Vancouver: New on b.c.’s official film lists is Night Man, Crescent Entertainment’s second syndicated series and more evidence that the Vancouver company’s year-long focused efforts to transform itself from service producer to independent producer have been well placed.

Night Man, based on a cartoon superhero, is actually in its second season after being produced in San Diego, but will be remade into a Canadian-content show by Crescent to take advantage of the tax incentives here.

Production begins this month and Atlantis is distributing.

The Crow, Stairway to Heaven is Crescent’s other fiction series in production. Based on the character from The Crow features, the 22-episode series goes to camera June 8 and wraps in February. Distribution is being handled by Alliance and PolyGram.

Meanwhile, Crescent partner Jayme Pfahl is taking on some work from Edmonton’s Great North Entertainment. Pfahl is producing the second season of disastertainment series Stormwarning for Discovery Channel. In the changeover, the 13-episode show will become a thematic hour with five human-interest stories about a common, yet extreme, weather occurrence.

At least 60 hours of television production will come out of Crescent’s office this year.

– Constructive entertainment

North Vancouver’s Queen Bee Productions takes its independent, preschool series Scoop & Doozie to camera June 1.

Produced by Romney Grant (The Urban Peasant, The Concrete Jungle) and created by writer Vicki Grant – the partners behind Queen Bee – Scoop & Doozie is a series of 26 15-minute episodes made for the cbc. The puppet series will be directed by Mark Lawrence (Street Cents, Spilled Milk, Canadian Sesame Street) and features Scoop, a talkative excavator, Doozie, a steady bulldozer, and Axel, a neurotic dump truck.

The puppets were designed by children’s illustrator Kim LaFave, who lives on the Sunshine Coast, and are manufactured by Adam Behr and Bill Terezakis, partners in Evolution Arts of Richmond.

The series is set for broadcast on cbc in February. Motion International, meanwhile, is handling international sales.

– First take a wolf

Deboragh Gabler’s production company Legacy Filmworks is backing the local production of Silver Wolf, a family feature written by Michael Amo about a teenager who is orphaned after a tragic snowboarding accident and is befriended by a wolf. Silver Wolf features Roy Scheider and camera work continues to June 16.

– TV times

Producer James Shavick’s collaboration with Saban Entertainment continues with Sweet Lies, an mow that will air on Fox Family Channel.

An action drama, Sweet Lies is about a woman wrongly convicted of her husband’s murder who escapes jail to find the real killer. Cast was not signed at press time. Production runs to June 11.

Meanwhile, Northern Exposure’s Janine Turner and screen veteran Hal Holbrook star in the cbs tv movie Beauty, a new take on the Beauty and the Beast story in which a painter falls in love with her portrait subject who is a disfigured man. Production runs until June 5.

And Vancouver’s Creative Partners is behind the half-hour Road Worthy, which airs on the Knowledge Network May 18. The program explores the disharmony between bikes and automobiles on the roads, offers safety tips for cyclists and features world champion mountain biker Alison Sydor of North Vancouver.

– Smaller is busier

Comet Post Production – the post house to the micro-budget producers – recently completed Cadence Entertainment’s feature Rupert’s Land and is currently editing and posting Convergence, a recently wrapped feature by producer Diane Patrick-O’Connor and director Gavin Wilding.

Comet edited four features in last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival – Kitchen Party, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, BBQ – A Love Story and Barnone.

Comet principals Patti Henderson and Fred Thorsen are also completing their own short, a comedic film called Up the Wall about a young painter dealing with a noisy neighbor. Shot last July, the short is destined for the festival circuit.

– Bravo!, encore

Bravo! has put up $15,000 for a five-minute video called Slave to Another God by Christopher Oben and Port Coquitlam surrealist painter Joel Alden Kingston. The piece, to be spot filler for the broadcaster, focuses on Kingston’s work, explores the artist’s relationship to his work and has a $50,000 budget. The producers say they will also cut a short film for the festival circuit.

– World-renowned figure-skating choreographer Kevin Cottam directs a six-minute short called Tantalus this month. Produced by Tier Na Nog Productions with Bravo!fact financial backing, Tantulus is a dance film about the mythical Tantulus banished to the underworld. Tantulus follows up Cottam’s six-minute dance film called Birth, inspired by the life cycle and produced in December.

– And the winner is…

In other awards news, writer/producer/director Mark Glover Masterson of Under the Gun Films won a silver screen award for Big Band Boom! The Dal Richards Orchestra from the 31st annual U.S. International Film and Video Festival in Chicago. The arts documentary aired on Bravo! in November. Next up for Masterson is completing the pilot of The Haircut series for ctv.