Vancouver: The western office of the National Film Board is racking up short animated productions.

African Rhythms, a five-minute film by Charles Githinji, is in production at the nfb’s Pacific Centre studio in Vancouver. The production – about a young boy who is sent on a mission to a distant village to fetch medicine for his ailing grandfather – involves drawn animation that is composited with live action. Effects and camera movement will also be done by computer.

Jill Haras, meanwhile, is directing Joe, a ‘whimsical’ five-minute animated film about the legendary Vancouver lifeguard Seraphim ‘Joe’ Fortes. Designed for young children as a tale of kindness, Joe combines traditional cutouts and computer animation and will be told as a poem.

Chinese Violin, a colorful, traditionally animated, eight-minute short for children, is about a young girl who emigrates with her father from China to Canada. Directed by Joe Chang and Gintaras Zubrickas, Chinese Violin explores, without narration, the challenges of immigration and cross-cultural differences.

Children’s five-minute short Little Armadillos – based on a song by John Forrest and animated by Debra Dawson – turns the human ear and eyebrow into a disco and playground for the microscopic mites that live on our bodies. Long John Baldry sings the title song that narrates the film.

All the shorts are produced by George Johnson and executive produced by Svend-Erik Eriksen. Delivery is late 2000 or early 2001.

*Local ambitions

Exiles in Paradise is a low-budget, high-definition video feature about the challenges of immigration.

Presold to Superchannel and TMN-The Movie Network, Exiles stars JR Bourne, Benita Ha and Dmitri Boudrine. Cast and crew are working on deferral and Sony is providing high-def equipment and stock. The film is Wesley Lowe’s feature debut. Production continues until the end of the month.

And writer/director/performer/producer Barry Levy wraps production on Spook, his play-turned-digital video film, at the end of the month. The story – about Canadians who fought with the Americans in the Vietnam War and Canada’s role in that war – explores issues around trauma. An ultra-low budget production with no distributor yet attached, Spook stars Levy, Peter LeCroix, Rachel Cronin and Jay Brazeau. The film will be offered to the festival circuit.

*Border crossings

American actor Sean Penn will direct The Pledge, an independent feature that has a negative pickup with Warner Bros. Jack Nicholson stars when production begins mid-February.

Another u.s. feature, Sanctimony, stars Catherine Oxenberg and Casper Van Dien in the story of a stock trader who turns murderous. It’s produced for Regent Entertainment by Vancouver’s Shavick Entertainment.

And, after analyzing feedback from some focus groups, New Line reshot the ending for Flight 180 (now called Final Destination), which took up production space in Vancouver for much of last year. The story, about teenagers who cheat death by getting off a doomed passenger jet only to find death stalking them, originally had a main character killed off at the end. In the new version, the character is assigned a different fate.

The one-week reshoot wrapped Jan. 18.

For the smaller screen, meanwhile, the series pilot City Lights (Viacom) is in production until Jan. 28. The story, a woman cop drama, stars Bonnie Bedelia and Nancy McKeon among an ensemble cast.

The Wednesday Woman is a cbs mow about a novelist who begins to live the life she wrote about in her novel – a story of a woman who falls in love with a convict who then murders her. The mow, based on the book Thursday’s Woman, stars Meredith Baxter, Peter Coyote and John Heard. Production wraps Feb. 12.

*Big Easy bound

Studio b is front and center among the b.c. companies using the British Columbia Film booth at this month’s natpe in New Orleans. The Vancouver animation company is showcasing its trio of new series – Yvon of the Yukon (ytv, 13 episodes), D’Myna Leagues (ctv and ytv, 13 episodes) and What About Mimi? (Teletoon, 26 episodes).

Airing this fall, Yvon of the Yukon follows the adventures of a French explorer who awakens after 300 years of frozen sleep to continue his mission to colonize the New World. Alliance Atlantis distributes the series worldwide, except in the u.k., where itel holds the program rights.

Airing on ctv/vtv this spring and in the fall of 2001 on ytv, D’Myna Leagues is about baseball-playing birds. Columbia TriStar distributes the series.

Teletoon and international distributor Decode back production of What About Mimi?, about an ‘irrepressible’ redhead who is described as ‘a kids’ Ally McBeal.’

Other companies sponsored by B.C. Film include: Big Red Barn Productions, Dark Horse Entertainment, Delaney & Friends Productions, Force Four Entertainment, Gordon Stanfield Animation, Insight Film & Video, Mainframe Entertainment, Natterjack Animation, PS Films, Queen Bee Productions and Sirius Animation.

Distributor Dark Horse recently acquired documentary Cueva Pintada (Cave Paintings), a look at ancient Mexican cave drawings by director/producer Michael Neitzel, and the series Great Scott (Sleep Apnea Productions, Vancouver), described as ‘television that bothers you’ with pesky host Gregg Scott.

*End begins

Steve Burgess and Karen Lam will host @the end, a new weekly CBC Newsworld current affairs show emanating from Vancouver live in primetime. A typical episode will feature an opening commentary from humorist Burgess, viewer e-mail interaction, in-studio interviews and on-location reports (by Lam) from a cultural event happening in Vancouver. It airs Friday nights at 11 p.m., starting Jan. 28.

* b.c. producer Robert Nichol is hoping that the Year 2000 proves the lucky one after 18 years of development on the screen version of Grey Owl’s classic Sajo and her Beaver People. The us$5 million ($7.2 million) feature, which has been close to production on more than one occasion, is scheduled tentatively for a summer shoot in Saskatchewan.

* Ken Frith’s Uncorrupted (Gold Star Productions) is a documentary about Rose Prince, an aboriginal thought to be a saint. The program aired the first of 10 play dates on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network Jan. 16. The story explores the holy young woman who died in 1949 at the age of 35. Legend has it that when her body was exhumed two years later, it hadn’t decomposed or was ‘uncorrupted,’ a religious sign of sainthood.