Wren/McLeod Films is making use of Allan Watanabe’s skills as an executive producer these days. Watanabe, who will continue to work with Gil Novis Productions on a project basis, has hooked up with Larry Wren and Bill McLeod for the time being and is doing the agency rounds with Montreal-based music video director Jim Donovan, whom Wren/McLeod is repping in Toronto. Wren/ McLeod is also promoting ‘top’ l.a. director Jim Edwards. ‘Jim is a big shooter,’ Watanabe says. ‘Big concepts and a big look.’

TGIF

and what of big sound? Derek Van Lint and Associates director/photographer/bass player Terry Collier rousts rock ‘n’ rollers from recliners every other Friday night at Toronto’s Stonecutter night spot. And he does it with two musical mates, his wife Trish and Stan Davidson.

Hot sound, hot plastic. DVLA South Beach has its first shoot for William Teale, of the Visa variety for Venezuela.

The Pied Pfeifer

of the many differences between commercial production in the Canadian and u.s. markets, one of the more striking is the role that sales representatives play.

In the u.s., many are as well known as the directors they represent.

And among the biggest of these personalities is Chuck Pfeifer, the rep who helped build the careers of such mega-directorial stars as Joe Pytka, Rick Levine and Mark Storey. Pfeifer has returned to commercial production with a vengeance at New York-based They Shoot Films after a side-bar venture as a restaurateur in a bar and eatery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

It’s no surprise that Toronto’s Mark Walton is suddenly bullish about his prospects in the u.s. now that he’s been signed on with Pfeifer as the last addition to the super-rep’s directorial stable.

Walton, who came off several days of shooting in Vancouver, says he’s quoting boards in major centers across the States and the prospects look good on a big project with a leading American advertiser.

Walton is represented in Canada with The Players.

The compressed ITS

to compress or not to compress? That was the everlastin’ question at a recent its video conference held in the first week of March as a prelude to a bigger seminar to be held at nab. In Toronto, its members gathered at a hookup provided at the SkyDome courtesy Dome Productions to hear the moderator and various guests address this and other burning post-production questions.

One expert, Steve Maggioncalda, says it’s fine to compress an image, but you can have trouble if you try to move the compressed image around or try to retrieve it intact from the Ampex dct system or digital Betacam. He says the losses may be minimal but they’re no more acceptable to high-end post-producers than they would be to word processors who found a few letters missing after they’d saved a given document too many times.

Another speaker, Gavin Schulz, says he doesn’t buy the argument offered by manufacturers that compression algorithms are ‘loss-less…The industry is trying to get us to swallow the thinking that if you don’t notice (the lost visual data), it doesn’t happen.’

Manufacturers speaking to the video conference say evolving compression standards such as mpeg may help alleviate the amount of detail lost through use of the jpeg standard (which is used, for instance, on the Avid nonlinear desktop video editing machine).

Phil Keeling of Toronto post facility Magnetic South says the compression standard is ‘not an issue on most applications,’ adding that Ampex dct is an improvement over D2, so manufacturers are ‘always trying to build the quality up.’

Magnetic personalities

elsewhere at Magnetic Enterprises, Magnetic North’s new director of sales is Mike McConnell. His responsibilities include tv series work, specials, mows and features. He is also running Mag North’s client services department and has made some changes in it: four-year Mag North staffer Heather McCrea becomes commercial project supervisor; Samara Melanson, formerly co-ordinator of long-form projects, is now long-form supervisor; and Jodi Anderson is the new scheduler at Mag North, planning time for suites, machines and creative staff.