Vancouver: While the fate of Omni Film’s teen soap Edgemont is in limbo following the recent Licence Fee Program announcements from the Canadian Television Fund, the production company’s new half-hour anthology series Keys Cut Here successfully ran the gauntlet. In fact, B.C. overall fared not too badly relative to the rest of the country reeling from funding, and now production, cuts.

B.C. received 10 of the 44 approved English-language productions, representing about $15.3 million of the $49.6 million available. That’s about 23% of the English envelop by title and 31% by value.

‘Looks to us, based on our analysis, that B.C. has done reasonably well out of this round,’ says Rob Egan, president of British Columbia Film. ‘But we still have to wait for the documentary funding,’ which affects a larger portion of the West Coast production industry.

Da Vinci’s Inquest (Haddock Entertainment/Barna Alper Productions) will go into season six and Cold Squad (Keatley MacLeod Productions) will go into season seven, with $4.2 million each from the LFP.

With $970,000 from the LFP, Brightlight Pictures of Vancouver will do a second season of Alienated, the shot-in-Victoria comedy series for CHUM. And Haddock Entertainment gets $621,000 for the two-part miniseries H20 for CBC.

Omni’s Keys Cut Here, about the residents of a West End Vancouver apartment building, received $1.1 million from the LFP.

B.C. producers also claimed four of the 11 successful English-language youth program applications, including two new animated series: Being Ian, a 26-part series by Studio B Productions for YTV, got $1.5 million; and Atomic Betty, a 26-part series by Atomic Cartoons for Teletoon, got $1.2 million.

After losing out on four attempts for CTF funding (including Being Ian) last year, Studio B focused on just one application this year – a re-engineered Being Ian that was more Canadian, says partner Chris Bartleman.

‘We knew it was going to be tough,’ he says, referring to the shrinking CTF and increasing competition. ‘We didn’t want to oversubscribe.’ Still, says Bartleman, Being Ian wasn’t crucial to the Vancouver animation company, having learned to diversify and create other projects that are non-content and not reliant on Canadian government funding.

The 13-part Family Channel series Whistler 4+1 (Mogul Productions) got $1.4 million, while Heads Up!, a 13-part series for TVOntario by Vancouver’s Soapbox Productions got $156,000.

In the auteur performing arts category, Elegie (Cine Qua Non Films) got $79,000 and is a B.C./Quebec coproduction.