Founded in 2016 by Dionne Copland and Louise Weard, CyberCraft Video is a rising independent production company with a prolific and distinctive body of work. In 2013, Dionne joined forces with Louise for the featurette Computer Hearts, which we self-distributed internationally on home video in 2015. Our award-winning short films Inferno and Haxx Deadroom followed in 2016, with the CyberCraft team going into production on our feature film Cold Wind Blowing in December 2017. In 2020 Cold Wind Blowing hit the festival circuit to wide acclaim and the CyberCraft team is currently in production on their next feature film.

Dionne Copland is the Writer and Director of the award-winning short films Inferno and Haxx Deadroom and the feature film Cold Wind Blowing. Growing up in small town Canada, Dionne fell in love with movies and pursued acting as her gateway to the film industry. Realizing that her passions lay behind the camera, she pivoted to a degree in Film Production where she partnered with Louise Weard on what became their dual directorial debut, Computer Hearts. Once in film school, Dionne continued writing and directing, with her freshman film Inferno screening around the world at over twenty film festivals and earning awards for “Best Short Film” and “Best Filmmaker.” Before graduating she co-founded her film production company CyberCraft Video with Louise.

In 2017, Dionne began production on her debut feature film, Cold Wind Blowing. The film would go on to be shortlisted for the 2020 Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight Program before its successful festival run, winning her the “Best Director Award” at the Genreblast Film Festival and screening at the Women in Horror Film Festival, Salem Horror Fest, and Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival before Cold Wind Blowing had its limited theatrical run and home video release in March 2022. The Alliance of Women in Film Journalists praised the film: “Cold Wind Blowing has all the elements of a really solid low-budget indie horror…if horror sans the male gaze is something you hunger for, this micro-budget indie is custom made for you.”

In July 2022 Dionne was invited to present her in-development feature Riding Shotgun at the Frontières Market at the Fantasia Film Festival where her pitch took the market by storm. The film is set to shoot in April 2024.

Dionne spends most of her time writing, sitting with an idea and allowing the characters to take her through it until they claw their way out. Her time spent with a character before they go out into the world is so intimate and collaborating on set to see them fully realized is even more rewarding as directing is where Dionne truly shines.

Louise Weard is a filmmaker with a degree in Film Semiotics. Hailing from Western Canada, she cut her teeth working as the cinematographer for FX legend Ryan Nicholson and emerged as an exciting new voice in underground horror with her breakout body-horror featurette Computer Hearts. Along with her filmmaking partner Dionne Copland, Louise established CyberCraft Video in 2016 and produced the short films Inferno and Haxx Deadroom, as well as the micro-budget queer slasher film Cuties. After film school she produced Dionne Copland’s feature-length debut, the cabin-in-the-woods creature-feature Cold Wind Blowing, which was released in 2022.

She has been obsessed with deeply personal (and perverse) movies that push the envelope for as long as she can remember, which culminated in her winning a Most Fearless Performance Award in 2015 for her short film S.I.D.S. in which she played herself as a transsexual woman seeking a back alley surgery. Nearly a decade after completing her debut film, Computer Hearts, it was rediscovered as a significant work of transgender horror cinema and screened at The Music Box in Chicago, IL during their Music Box of Horrors event in October 2022.

Her film theory writing encompasses work on the on-screen semiotics of the Marquis de Sade and a comprehensive history of films featuring phallic genital trauma, the latter of which can be found in the book Divergent Terror: The Crossroads of Queerness and Horror. In September 2022, she co-hosted the 100 Best Kills event at Fantastic Fest in a night dedicated to castration scenes in film.

For Louise, cinema is about illuminating the most secretive and problematic parts of the self and using storytelling to connect with other freaks and outcasts so that nobody has to feel alone. Her obsessions include ritual Magick, Gnosticism, and UFOs, and when she’s not making movies you’ll find her championing unsung visionary filmmakers through her film writing and her roles at various film festivals. She has also directed some extremely transgressive music videos for musical artists Ravine Angel and Lauren Bousfield, and while filming one she may have “accidentally” performed a ritual that made her trans.