Vancouver: Titanic is the last service production project Vancouver’s Crescent Entertainment will undertake, not because the ship is going down, but because the company is moving into 100% indigenous production.

Titanic, a four-hour, us$10 million miniseries, wraps in September and will air on cbs during November sweeps.

Of the Vancouver production companies wearing both ‘Independent’ and ‘For Hire’ producer caps, eight-year-old Crescent is the first to sever the flow of film and television work from the Americans and move into the next stage of its business plan.

‘We went into service production in order to finance our own projects, says Crescent president Harold Tichenor. ‘Keeping the company active in service means not having time to do your own projects.’

Those homegrown projects include the cd-rom project A Ghost in the Dark – which is back on track after Crescent struck a deal with the new owners of one-time project partner Motion Works Group – and an $8 million wwi feature called Brothers, written by Vancouver playwright John Gray.

‘We’ve invested between $300,000 and $400,000 in development (of independent projects) over the life of the company,’ says Tichenor.

‘Corporations need a single mandate in the greater scheme of things, so we’ve withdrawn the active (service production) marketing of the company.

‘It’s served its purpose. We need to move on to other things.’

Crescent has three equal partners: Tichenor, Jayme Pfahl and Gordon Mark.

While Tichenor says each may on occasion take a service production job in the future, the work will be done outside of Crescent.

But in the long term, Tichenor sees pitfalls for service production in b.c. He points to stiffer financial requirements, increasing locations problems, dwindling public support, and a loss of interest in the smaller-budget, routine shows.