Tattersall and friends bring home a BAFTA

Jane Tattersall, head of Toronto’s Tattersall Sound & Picture, along with audio post collaborators David McCallum and Lou Solakofski and British sound recordist Simon Okin, took home the trophy in the sound fiction/entertainment category for the mini Sex Traffic at the recent British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards. The Canucks were on hand in London to accept their prize at the May 8 ceremony.

Sex Traffic, a copro with the U.K. that aired locally on CBC, won in eight of its nine nominated categories, including music for Canadian composer Jonathan Goldsmith.

The same audio post team has reunited for the forthcoming feature Beowulf & Grendel.

-www.tattersallsoundandpicture.com

Mr. X grows, cooks up FX

Toronto boutique FX shop Mr. X is in growth mode, adding senior visual effects supervisor Evan Jacobs and expanding its facility.

Jacobs comes from Digital Domain in Venice, CA, and will get right to work on the thriller Revolver, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Meanwhile, Mr. X has increased studio size by 20%, adding disk space, a more powerful network and more workstations. Recent projects include John Singleton’s Four Brothers, the animated Happily N’Ever After, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies and Truth, Justice, and the American Way starring Ben Affleck.

-www.mrxfx.com

Editing without Fear

Toronto’s Fearless Films has put its latest acquisitions to immediate use. An HD suite upgraded with the Avid DS Nitris system is being employed on the MOW One Dead Indian for Sienna Films and CTV. The shop is doing online, color correction and mastering to 24 frames per second for HDCAM.

Fearless has also added support for the HDV format, currently a popular choice for docs including the Markham Street Films/VisionTV series Shrines & Homemade Holy Places that it will be posting.

The shop has also hosted features including Deepa Mehta’s Water and Nisha Ganatra’s Cake (edited by Michael Munn) and performed color correction and online for the Insight Productions/CBC series pilot Hatching, Matching and Dispatching.

-www.fearlessfilms.com

Switch-hitting from features to TV

Toronto-based Switch VFX will soon complete FX on the George Romero zombie flick Land of the Dead. The shop is responsible for 125 shots, including matte paintings, digital ‘goop’ and decapitations.

The shop is also wrapping up on the locally shot USA Network Kojak series, doing the show’s signature transition shots as well as matte paintings. Finally, Switch designed, animated and composited the recent music video The Last Recidivist for indie rock band Lowest of the Low.

Switch is the sister company of 3D-animation studio Yowza Digital, affiliated with 2D-animation shop Yowza Animation.

-www.switchvfx.com

Reality at Optix West, toons at Wanted

Things are abuzz at the downtown Toronto facility shared by editing house Optix West and audio shop Wanted Post Production.

Optix West, a division of Optix Digital Pictures, has been busy posting the 13-ep Bravo! series Strip Search, which tracks the genesis of an all-male dance troupe, and the two-part Discovery doc Slam Bam, which examines the realities of wrestling. OW has also cut 20 eps of The Star Treatment (Star!/A&E), which explores celebrity lifestyles.

Meanwhile, Wanted has been performing audio post on a number of animated series, including Teletoon’s Atomic Betty and 6Teen, and CBC’s Blob Heads.

-www.optix.ca

-www.wantedstudios.com

White Iron’s MLB intro a hit

Calgary’s White Iron Digital recently put its creativity to the test on broadcast design work for ESPN Sunday Night Baseball telecasts.

Jeff August, the shop’s creative director, was charged with making intro versions for both ESPN and ESPN2, creating a pre-produced opening that would be combined with live game shots.

White Iron used more than 25 shots of great baseball moments, converting the material from standard definition to HD. The shop also used HD banners, live voice-overs and transitions to 12-second animations to give viewers the sense that they had been watching baseball on ESPN for years.

-www.whiteirondigital.tv