Winnipeg: Kim Todd has left Credo Entertainment and opened her own Winnipeg-based production house, Original Pictures.

A vp, executive producer and shareholder at Credo for more than six years, Todd’s credits include producing and exec producing The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, which recently completed a 65-episode run.

Original Pictures will develop and produce tv programming and feature films in all genres, says Todd.

The production company has raised operating capital from private investors, but Todd remains the majority shareholder. Bannaytyne Financial of Winnipeg provided the business planning and is being retained in an advisory capacity.

Todd is scouring the country for an executive to handle corporate and production financing. ‘I’m looking for a deal-maker,’ she says.

Original’s slate includes Emma, a half-hour live-action/animated children’s series in development with the cbc. The series follows the escapades of a precocious nine-year-old girl with an over-active imagination that takes her into all sorts of interesting and unusual worlds. Emma deals with all the trials and tribulations of leaving childhood behind by turning to her dreamland and her love of drawing and painting.

The fantasy component will be animated and Emma’s ‘real life’ will be live action.

Elizabeth Steward, executive story editor on Shirley, has written a bible and three scripts.

Todd is in the midst of closing a coproduction deal with an animation company that also operates a distribution arm. International partners will also be brought on board, says Todd. The budget is $390,000 per half-hour.

The company is developing the feature Stir-Fry, a $3.2-million Canada/Ireland coproduction with Dublin-based Horizonline Films. Based on a book by Irish immigrant Emma Donoghue, who penned the script, the film is an offbeat romantic comedy about a first-year university student who arrives in Dublin from a small Irish town determined to experience all of big-city life all at once, which she does, but not in the way she anticipated.

The director, Dearbhla Walsh, is from Ireland. Alan Fitzpatrick is the producer for Horizonline. Talks with Canadian distributors are underway. The project will be a majority Irish coproduction.

The shoot will require four weeks on location in Ireland and two weeks in studio in Winnipeg. Post will stay in Canada. The game plan is to shoot later this year.

Anne Wheeler is attached to direct Mrs. Mike, a tv movie being developed by Original based on the book of the same title.

Set in the late 1800s, Mrs. Mike is the story of an 18-year-old girl from Boston who is sent to her uncle’s ranch in Alberta to recover from a long illness. She marries a Mountie and moves north to the trapping community where he is stationed. The drama unfolds as the city-bred girl struggles to adapt to life in a small northern town.

Sharon Gibbon wrote the script.

Todd says she is looking to attach an American star to attract a u.s. sale. Marion Rees and Associates, an l.a.-based production and distribution company, is interested in selling the mow in the u.s., she adds.

Canadian broadcasters will be shopped the $3.5-million project over the next several months.

Todd will continue to work on Taiga, a $10-million feature film to be coproduced by Credo, Norway’s Northern Lights and Denmark’s Balboa 2 Productions. Taiga follows a group of teenagers who must fend for themselves after their plane crashes in a remote area south of the tundra in the Soviet Union. Shooting begins in August in Flin Flon, Man.