Lacewood Studio’s former vp of production Lee Williams has opened up his own Ottawa animation company, Boomstone Entertainment, with partner Debra Wynter, but the 12-year Lacewood veteran isn’t straying far from his roots.

Lacewood has contracted Williams to direct its two half-hour specials The Teddy Bear Adventures, budgeted at $550,000 each, for air on ctv and Disney Channel.

The new company is also producing the new Lacewood series SoulMates, a 26-episode f/x-heavy animated kids’ series centering on two positive-thinking aliens. Although a broadcaster hasn’t been confirmed, Williams says the us$250,000 per episode property is targeted for teletoon. A French coproducer is attached to the project and production is skedded for the fall.

Boomstone also has five specials of its own in development under the banner The Canadian Collection, a set of traditional holiday stories. It is also delving into service work and is currently quoting on a straight-to-video feature for a Canadian company and operating a Website creation division.

Wynter, who headed the operations of Maclean Hunter Cable tv’s facility in Renfrew, Ont. and has production management experience on many of Lacewood’s projects, is serving as producer and vp of the new company, with Williams acting as both president and producer/director.

-Out of the dark

‘Some people say my films are kind of dark,’ says indie filmmaker Edmond Chan, ‘but I think they are quite enlightening. You often arrive at something illuminating by going through something dark.’

With that in mind he coined his new Toronto production company Paradark Films (para meaning moving beyond), which first saw the light of day in January.

In the six months since, partners Chan, who has worked on Rhombus Media and Devine Entertainment projects and edited Canadian Film Centre alumnus Yan Chiu’s 1995 Berlin Film Festival Panorama prize-winning Chinese Chocolate, and Nicholas Tabarrok, an experienced production manager, have wrapped their first two films, piggybacking both production schedules simultaneously to cut costs.

Caprice, a four-minute performing arts film, premiering July 14 on Bravo!, features dancers Day Helesic and Daniel Wild and Toronto Symphony Orchestra cellist David Hetherington, with choreography by Martine Charron.

Funding from BravoFact! greenlit the $18,000 short, but for their first feature, Garage, the partners took the financing path familiar to most first-time, small-budget indie filmmakers ­ pestering relatives and friends for handouts, cashing in on favors and fast-talking small business investors, not to mention counting the pennies stashed in a jar.

Still, they managed to come up with the $500,000 budget to produce the psycho-thriller and plan to screen the film to potential distributors in late July. Chan has shown an early cut to Brian Glisserman at Cineplex Odeon and Image Corp. and says both companies have shown interest.

And true to the company name, dark this film is. Set in an underground garage below Chan’s Toronto apartment, a trapped couple lose track of reality and fantasy. One dream sequence involves a character envisioning his parents as monster-like manifestations of his inner demons that ‘sort of feed off each other ­ literally,’ says Chan. But the filmmaker insists the picture is neither disgusting nor graphic but a strong ‘psychological, character-driven script.’

Robert Squire, fresh from York University’s acting school, and stage actor Astrid VanWieren make their film debuts in Garage.

Chan has another half-hour performing arts piece in the works showcasing the music of composer Chan Kanin. Two features, both written by Chan, are in development: Surprising Mother, a $500,000 Chinese family drama set in Vancouver (he’s looking for a West Coast coproducer), and Fanny Can’t Stay, a Chinese gangster movie he describes as a ‘romantic, retro, road-movie thriller’ with a projected budget of $1.5 million.

-In Motion

Another Toronto upstart, First Motion Pictures, comprised of E. Thomas Canton, Paul Sh’ebridge and William Corno, has Cineplex Odeon, Everest Entertainment and Sony Classic looking at an early cut of its first feature Jigsaw, a film noir crime thriller starring Erica Ehm.

Canton has penned another script, The Adulterer’s Guide To Toronto, and has invited media, broadcasters, distributors and talent agencies to a staged screenplay reading of the romantic comedy at the Idler Pub July 19 to gauge early interest. Screenplay performances are the latest trend in nyc and l.a., says Canton.

The producers are looking for a distributor before beginning production, aimed for August. The film follows three married couples, all friends, who become tangled in a web of infidelity. Budget hasn’t been tied down.

-Old tune, new spin and dinner with the Queen

‘It’s not a bad anthemŠas far as anthems go.’

That said, when Heritage Canada asked National Film Board producer Peter Starr to remake the 20-year-old nfb Canada Day vignette he said sureŠbut with one catch.

‘I told them I wanted to do something different, the usual take on these things is rather staid.’

Thinking big screen, epic feature, Star worked with Millennium composers Claude Desjardins and Eric Robertson, a 57-piece orchestra with sweeping violin sections, and full digital surround sound at Manta Eastern to create a score to rival any big-budget feature.

Visuals were taken from nfb archival footage, and high-speed, high-definition footage from the imax feature Momentum was transferred to tape. Total budget on the two-minute clip was $100,000.

When the folks at Heritage saw the cut, edited by Smash’s Denis Takacs, they decided it deserved a higher profile launch than tv broadcast sign-offs and premiered the vignette at the June 28 Royal York reception for Queen Elizabeth.

Apparently Prince Philip was particularly moved.

-Local boy makes good

They say good things come to those who wait, and it took Toronto writers John Silverstein and David Chudnovsky eight years and numerous expired options to see their first screenplay produced. But when it finally happened they scored big.

New York independent Silver Films, a production company headed by director Joan Micklin Silver (Crossing Delancey, Hester Street) and producer Raphael Silver, picked up the script and fast-tracked it into production in May, with Jerry Stiller (George’s father on Seinfeld) and Daytrippers star Anne Meara leading the cast.

The romantic comedy follows a couple whose 40-year marriage is on the rocks and a number of assorted meddlers do their best (and worst) to bring them back together. Shot and currently in post in New York, the picture has been submitted to the Toronto International Film Festival.

To support his screenwriting habit, Silverstein operates prop rental company Hot Properties, specializing in decorative arts, while Chudnovsky is a partner in film vehicle company Power Nap.

The writing partners have a few unpolished scripts in the works, but Silverstein, in his mid-forties and with a wife, kids and mortgage, d’esn’t have stars in his eyes or his sights set on Hollywood. ‘I’m far too old to run away and join the circus,’ he says.

-A winning doc

Christa Singers Productions in Toronto scored a hat trick with its first one-hour doc Wisdom of the Heart about women and heart disease. The film recently picked up a Silver Apple at the National Educational Media Network Awards in California, a Silver Medal at the Houston International Film Festival and a Bronze plaque at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival.

And hot on the heels of those successes, director/producer Catherine Annau and exec producer Singer are in the midst of closing a deal on their next project, tentatively titled Rhythms of Life, a look at how the latest technology is changing the practice of medicine.

Broadcast licences have been secured from tvontario as the first window, as well as Vision tv, Knowledge and scn. A production schedule hasn’t been set but the shoot will be in Ontario. Annau is directing as well as coproducing with Howard Hutton.