Toronto-based service company MIJO Corporation, which boasts a who’s who in Canadian and U.S. production, broadcast and distribution on its client list, is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

The full-service boutique that packages ads for feature films, with divisions specializing in duplication, closed-captioning, printing, media storage and post-production, started in a two-bedroom apartment while partners Joel Reitman and Michael Goldberg were majoring in communications at New York’s Ithaca College.

According to Reitman (originally from Montreal), he and Goldberg (a native of New York) would routinely travel to Canada to take summer jobs in the film industry.

‘In that process we interviewed various film distributors who at that time were having most of their [advertising] services provided by American companies and we felt there was a void in Canada in servicing American distributors and we wanted to fill that void,’ says Reitman. The partners’ first break came with the 1979 feature Norma Rae, for which they undertook the Canadian marketing initiatives.

Fast forward a quarter century and MIJO’s core business is essentially the same, but now encompasses a broad range of divisions, including Comprehensive Distributors, Rocket Digital Post & Sound, MIJO Print Technologies, slingspot.com, Undercover Film & Electronic Media Storage, The Clearing House and Broadcast Clearance Advisory, all of which were recently merged into one office on T.O.’s Queen St. East.

The entire system is wired and connected so that much of MIJO’s workflow, particularly its closed-captioning, is shuttled digitally, Reitman says.

‘Rather than working in the tape world, we are able to send captioned files over the Internet to wherever a producer is who needs their work captioned,’ says Reitman, who says MIJO has a similar system in place through its slingspot.com division, which transfers and tracks audio commercials among all interested creative parties online.

‘This is something that we feel is the future – a virtual world of electronics and seeing the Internet pay off for you. I think TV will evolve the same way,’ he says.

-www.mijo.ca