Post Producers Digital says it is trying to move into the realm of drama, but the transition is not easy. The two-year-old Toronto offline/online editing house has built its business on commercial, infomercial, corporate and music video projects. It has also provided editorial on info TV series for Vision TV, Life Network, TSN and WTN as well as documentaries that have aired on local networks including CBC and in Finland and Sweden.

"A lot of the drama is being done by Alliance Atlantis Communications, which has its own post [houses]," explains Roy Clute, VP market development at PPD. "And if Americans come up here to shoot a drama, there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to go back home to edit. So it leaves only a little bit left for the rest of us."

PPD recently worked on three docs for Edmonton-based Great North Productions. The first, Sir Arthur Currie: Guts and Gaitors, for which it performed offline and online, is for the History Television series The Canadians: Biographies of a Nation. It focuses on the controversial Victoria-born WWI general who led Canadian soldiers – many of whom would die – in an early-morning attempt to capture the Belgian city of Mons, despite the scheduled Armistice for 11 a.m. that day. The program airs April 11.

PPD editor Brian Fearon, working with project writer/director Roxanna Spicer, composited and layered images as well as treating certain scenes with CineLook and the Aged Film effect.

PPD was later hired to do conforming on Brother 12, another installment in the series (airing May 2), which traces mysterious 1920s B.C.-based occultist Edward Arthur Wilson.

"In the conform [the producers] found out we had some effects capabilities, and were impressed," Clute recalls. PPD editor and VP operations Colm Caffrey subsequently used color effects, layering and treatment of still shots on the project. Both Sir Arthur Currie and Brother 12 were edited uncompressed and output to Digital Betacam.

Lastly, PPD provided offline for Great North’s Polish Homecoming, which will air in the fall as part of History’s Going Home series. The film documents the meeting between a father and his adult son given up for adoption, who together travel to Poland to trace their family history. Cut by Fearon, the emphasis of the show is on storytelling and the need for effects minimal.

PPD is equipped with an Avid Media Composer 400S offline suite, three NT Avid Media Composer 1000XL online suites and a new Avid Media Composer 9000XL online system. With more productions relying on editing houses to provide 3D F/X, PPD’s six full-time editors are geared to answer the call. The online suites are juiced up with Avid 3dfx, ICEfx boards (which multiply rendering speed and add nearly 50 F/X filters), Intraframe Editing with effects, CG and audio capabilities, and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. It also has an After Effects workstation for 3D graphics.

Clute is particularly excited about Ravel’s Brain, a recent collaboration with Rhombus Media and France’s Ideale Audience International that blends fact, docudrama and experimental technique to form a "musical expressionist poem" about the composer’s final years following a car accident in 1932.

Working with director Larry Weinstein, Caffrey provided layering of F/X and pictures to make the imagery more abstract. PPD also used color elements and created scratches and flares to "age" the dramatic recreations, lending to them a genuine archival feel. It even produced a title card that bloomed as if it had gone through a decades-old lab process.

"Larry said it was visually the most ambitious project of the 15 films he has done, and the post-production reflected that," Clute says.

He also says the finished footage is so realistic that viewers in France, where the program has already aired, believed they were watching actual movies of Ravel shot in Paris.

The film airs May 5 on Bravo!, with a second window later on CBC. *

-www.ppd.on.ca