As recently as a couple of months ago, Alex Olegnowicz, president of Toronto’s Imarion Post Production, noted pessimism among his clients, not to mention several shows not going forward. ‘The market is way tighter,’ he told Playback then, citing the impact of the drop in the federal government’s annual Canadian Television Fund allotment. But now, with the feds having restored their contribution to $100 million a year for the next two years, a dark cloud has lifted.

‘Producers seem a lot happier now,’ he says. ‘There seems to be a lot more production going on.’

In fact, the editorial, FX and animation shop has not only been busy through it all, but it has been able to grow and expand, buoyed by ongoing relationships with the likes of Toronto prodcos Associated Producers, YAP Films and Red Apple Entertainment.

Imarion’s recent expansion saw it take over the first floor of its location west of downtown Toronto. The extra space accommodates four new offline suites and an additional online suite. Its arsenal now also includes one Avid Symphony, one discreet smoke (and another on the way), and 3D-animation capabilities with both discreet and Alias Maya. To deal with the transition-to-HD era, the company has also recently acquired a Teranex system that performs format up-, down- and cross-conversion as well as film cleanup.

The studio cuts on Avid Xpress Pro, improved with four Avid Mojo boxes for hardware acceleration, so, as Olegnowicz says, ‘all clients can have realtime everything.’

Imarion’s full-time staff now stands at nearly a dozen. ‘We try to keep the overhead as low as possible, and the head count goes up depending on the projects,’ says Olegnowicz. And Imarion’s HD infrastructure has helped land gigs to keep that head count up.

One recent example is Shipsbreakers, a two-hour National Film Board HD doc copro with Toronto’s Storyline Entertainment, about a maritime graveyard in India. Imarion provided all online and color correction on the project, using its smoke. It did the same for Breakthrough Films & Television’s resuscitated Paradise Falls series, which was denied CTF funds at one point before eventually being accepted. The steamy Showcase soap has upgraded from shooting on DVCPRO 480p to 24p Sony HDCAM. Falls marks Imarion’s first drama gig.

The shop is finishing many projects in HD, even if they are currently being broadcast in standard definition.

‘The producers are banking on a longer shelf life for their shows, which I think is going to happen,’ Olegnowicz explains. ‘I see the demand of, say, Discovery [for HD programming]. They need so much material that everybody wants to start doing hi-def.’

A couple of years back, Imarion was nominated for an Emmy for graphic and artistic design on YAP’s doc Planet Storm, which Olegnowicz says raised the company’s FX profile. In addition to its editorial work on Paradise Falls, Imarion contributed FX including making certain shots day-for-night.

For Red Apple, the shop has posted Opening Soon, a fly-on-the-wall look at a restaurant opening for Food Network, the crime doc series Masterminds for History Television and The Surgeons for Discovery Health. ‘They’re always here,’ Olegnowicz says of Red Apple.

Olegnowicz says he had Canada’s first smoke on the Linux system for beta testing on The Surgeons and other projects, comparing its rendering time to that of the Avid Symphony. ‘It’s great. [The smoke on the Linux] is way faster,’ he notes.

Imarion has also been running the gamut for Canadian Geographic Presents for Discovery Channel Canada, providing all offline, online and CG for the doc series about Canuck natural wonders. For one installment, Imarion built a CG shark using NewTek LightWave software and Adobe Photoshop.

The shop did online for a pair of installments of CBC’s Witness, including YAP’s Friendly Fire (which aired on June 2), about a pair of tragic wartime incidents, finished in SD on the smoke, and Associated Producers’ Impact of Terror (airing June 16), about a suicide bombing in Israel. Imarion is also in the middle of three one-hours of Canada’s War: In Colour (previously titled Canada’s War: The Lost Colour Archives), a doc that collects World War II-era home movies shot in color. The eclectic mix of small-format footage will necessitate a particularly painstaking finishing job on Imarion’s part.

One of the most intriguing projects Imarion has been working on is the HD The Exodus Revealed, an Associated Producers feature doc for Discovery Canada, which seeks to bring to light historical artifacts that corroborate Biblical text. The project’s innovative approach – telling its story in a completely virtual environment – has challenged the studio to take its FX chops to a new level. AP’s editor on the project, Ian Morehead, has spearheaded the cutting over at Imarion’s facility.

AP’s Simcha Jacobovici, who is directing, describes the film’s style as ‘Dali meets The Matrix.’

The project, sure to garner media attention, airs on Discovery Canada in the fall.

-www.imarion.com