Production is booming on the Prairies. Following is a sampling, just some of the projects being produced and developed by the region’s busy film and tv production companies.

Minds Eye Pictures

Regina’s Mind’s Eye Pictures is celebrating its 10th birthday with a jammed production schedule and a spate of coproductions with Toronto’s Film Works.

Last fall, Minds Eye and Film Works wrapped shooting on two coproductions originally planned as Ontario shoots but moved to Saskatchewan after funding freezes at the Ontario Film Development Corporation and ofip.

Lyddie, a $7 million mow coproduced with Film Works and the u.k.’s Wall to Wall Television, airing on the cbc and bbc, is based on the Katherine Paterson novel of the same name and chronicles the struggles of a young girl in industrial revolution-era eastern Ontario.

Standing in for 1860s Cornwall were various locations in southern Saskatchewan, from Regina to Kinookimaw, where a combination of real Quaker homesteads and constructed sets were used to capture the period.

On My Mind, a six-part, $1.45 million pilot which was moved from Toronto to Saskatchewan, also wrapped last fall.

Minds Eye vp of development Josh Miller, recently stationed out of Alberta, says his inaugural project there is Amazing Story Studio, a 13-episode, half-hour series for preteens based on stories created by school kids.

The project, a coproduction between Minds Eye, Film Works and Verite Films of Toronto, with the participation of WIC Western International Communications through ITV Edmonton, began in Ontario and moved westward where producers have been scouring Alberta classrooms looking for yarn-spinning youngsters. The stories will be adapted into short tv dramas narrated by their authors. Stories are being collected to month’s end and shooting is scheduled to begin June 1.

The Lost Daughter, a four-hour miniseries being coproduced with Switzerland’s Condor Films, is a fictionalized account of the Solar Cult, which made news with its activities in Quebec and Switzerland a year and a half ago. Principal photography is set to begin in April in Regina, Montreal and Switzerland, with Germany’s Sat 1 on board as a broadcaster. The project is budgeted at $8 million.

Minds Eye also anticipates a summer shoot for Once There Was An Arrow, a $7 million four-hour miniseries with Film Works about the ill-fated Canadian Avro Arrow fighter planes. The project is in development with the cbc, as is Broncos, a tv movie based on the Swift Current Broncos junior hockey team and their struggle to deal with the tragic deaths of their teammates in a bus accident.

In development for ’97 is Open Season, a coproduction with Ann Bromley Productions, Toronto and Baton Broadcasting based on the true story of a Native athlete gunned down in a white supremacist conspiracy.

The company’s action/adventure feature Decoy starring Peter Weller (Robocop) and Robert Patrick (Terminator II) debuted in theaters in Regina in December.

Credo Entertainment

Manitoba’s series-minded Credo Entertainment is planning to begin shooting The Adventures of Shirley Holmes in late spring. The 26-episode, half-hour kids’ detective series is being developed with Vancouver’s Forefront Productions, ytv and two u.k. companies, Winchester and Winklemania.

The children’s series, which revolves around the adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ great grand-niece, the recipient of the Holmes family investigative gene, will air on ytv. The Credo/Atlantis Films series My Life as a Dog wraps at the end of this month and the company may be looking at a second season.

Credo also has two features going into production in ’96. Wits End, written by Robert Lower, is a film noir set in rural Manitoba about a wwi pow who comes to Manitoba to search for gold stolen from him during the war. A screen adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s Stone Angel is also in development with Atlantis, with Credo’s Kim Todd producing.

For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, an mow for cbc, will go into production early this year. The film is based on the Governor General Award-winning book by David Adams, who also wrote the script, and is being developed with Winnipeg’s Flat City Films. Flat City’s Norma Bailey will direct and produce and Michael Scott of Credo will produce.

Together with Edmonton-based Summit Films, Credo is also developing Hockey Night in Harlem, a tv movie based on the Ice Hockey in Harlem program in New York whereby city youth are sent to hockey camp in the Canadian midwest, where the salutary effects of clean air and healthy competition have had some success in turning troubled lives around.

Maddin’s twilight

Another of Winnipeg’s colorful denizens, Guy Maddin, is ‘trying to get off the ground’ with his feature Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. Maddin says the film’s budget, around $1 million, is very loosely sketched out and financing has not been finalized.

Nymphs will be a Canada/u.k. coproduction with Keith Griffiths, who was involved with Maddin’s lauded short film Odilon Redon. Winnipeg-based Ritchard Findley will also produce, with Credo head Derek Mazur executive producing.

Described by Maddin as ‘a tragic rondo of unrequited love set in a land where the sun rarely sets,’ the film features a kind of reverse seasonal affective disorder where, during long summer days, ‘incessant sunniness comes to play a role in the state of every character’s mind, aggravating the already aggravated state of mind involved in unrequited love.’

Drugs, dogs and digitality at Heartland

Regina’s Heartland Motion Pictures will relaunch the film that wouldn’t be, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, after the passing Prairie winter permits it.

The tv movie, a coproduction with Atlantis and Citadel Films of Halifax, directed by Randy Bradshaw (The Song Spinner), was originally slated for production on the East Coast last year. The shoot was then moved to Saskatchewan where crew availability concerns and the impending winter stalled the shoot until May.

Heartland will also begin principal photography on Wild Boys, an alternative youth-oriented western, in Saskatchewan in August. The feature was written by Victor Nicolle and is being produced by Doug Nicolle with b.c.-based Spectra Communications.

A low-budget feature, Jumping Jack, is also in development, and Onda says the project has been generating significant interest south of the border. The action/adventure spans the growth of the cocaine economy in Colombia and Miami and chronicles a major cocaine bust in New Brunswick in 1991.

Heartland has done some shopping in the u.s. with the project and a ‘trade mission’ is set for January to follow up with interested parties. Budget details are not finalized, but Onda says if the project is produced within Canada it should be in the $3 million to $4 million range, however, because of the interest generated, it ‘could turn into something much larger.’

Heartland is also expanding its sphere of influence into the area of multimedia production with the creation of two educational cd-roms.

The first, Ideas and Inspiration, was developed for high schools with the departments of education in b.c., Saskatchewan and Ontario. The second cd, as yet untitled, is in the form of a talking book aimed at children learning to read.

The cds are developed by Heartland’s own multimedia team including in-house producer Leif Storm.

Utopia Cafe Productions, comprised of Stephen Hall’s Regina-base Platypus Productions and Heartland, has wrapped the second season of Utopia Cafe, a half-hour series on Canadian youth airing on CBC Saskatchewan. A third season is anticipated for the show, which has been sold to NBC Asia, and Hall points to the possibility of the series being broadcast nationally on cbc following changes in the public network’s schedule.

Buffalo Gal

With the Credo coproduction My Mother’s Ghost in post-production, Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal Pictures has a 13-episode series on women in the workplace in development for wtn to air this spring. Making it Work is a coproduction with Winnipeg-based Breathe Again Productions.

A docudrama on Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, coproduced with Montreal’s Les Productions de l’Impatiente, and a 13-part tv series on holistic healing for Vision tv are also in development.