It’s been a busy summer for The Comweb Group. Not only has the company scrambled to meet a sudden surge in demand for production services, but it has also sold its L.A.-based equipment supplies operation, ended a long-standing partnership with Toronto prodco Protocol Entertainment, and entered a new partnership with Vancouver-based post company Rainmaker.

At press time, Comweb was finalizing the sale of its L.A.-based William F. White operation to Cinelease, a locally based production rental company. The decision to sell, according to Comweb president and CEO Paul Bronfman, was driven primarily because he could not find the right management team in L.A. to run the operation.

‘We decided that, rather than continuing the fight upstream, we were better off just focusing on our core market, which is Canada,’ says Bronfman. The William F. White office in L.A. ‘was really high maintenance. It was sucking a lot of time and energy away from our core business, so we decided to call it a day.’

Bronfman sold the White camera division to Panavision earlier this year.

Bronfman has also ended a 12-year relationship with Protocol, which is splitting from the umbrella group to make a go of it alone. Protocol president Steve Levitan and Bronfman jointly founded Protocol in 1993 as a member company of The Comweb Group.

‘It ended up being that very little of [Bronfman’s] time was available for the production company, so the 50/50 partnership idea no longer made sense,’ says Levitan, explaining that the split was amicable. Protocol has produced a number of shows, including Metropia on the OMNIs, YTV’s Canada/Australia copro The Saddle Club and the recently canceled Train 48.

Bronfman has also entered a new relationship with Rainmaker, making Comweb a significant shareholder in the Vancouver visual FX and post-production company. The Rainmaker Income Fund will acquire Comweb’s Entertainment Partners Canada and Comweb Film Capital as of Aug. 5. With offices in Toronto and Vancouver, these companies administer tax credits and payroll services for the film and television industry across Canada. Comweb Group’s current president, Mark Prior, steps in to become CEO of the Rainmaker Income Fund, with Bronfman joining Rainmaker’s board of trustees.

For Comweb, all these changes come at a time when the industry has taken an abrupt turn for the better. Production volumes surged suddenly this summer, leaving Comweb’s production services companies scrambling to meet demand.

Bronfman says that 2004 was among the worst years on record for Canada’s production sector and that the first quarter of 2005 showed no signs of improvement.

‘In March, I remember scratching my head trying to figure out how we were going to make it, then things just exploded. The turnaround happened within 30 days,’ he says.

With files from Kerrin McNamara

-www.comwebgroup.com