Alliance Atlantis Communications’ children’s label, AAC Kids, and Winklemania have gone to camera on the second season of I Was a Sixth Grade Alien, a 22-episode, half-hour, sci-fi comedy series for ytv in Canada and Fox Family Channel in the u.s.

The second season is set to launch this summer on Fox Family and in the fall on ytv, only this year it will come equipped with an interactive television component and companion website, being developed by technical partner ExtendMedia.

Much like the Drop the Beat multiplatform model, viewers with the appropriate set-top boxes can play games on the tv screen, look up words and delve into layers of information about the characters and the show.

‘Web tv and Open tv subscribers with set-top boxes that have keyboards can operate the interactive tv component that way or they can use their remote control like a mouse,’ explains Suzanne Chapman, creative exec on the series and producer of the interactive itv component and website.

The itv component is being developed for Microsoft tv, Liberate tv, Web tv and Open tv.

Both the itv component and the companion website are predicated on the company receiving assistance from the Bell New Media Fund, which can provide up to $500,000. Word is expected by the end of June.

Meantime, production on the third season of The Famous Jett Jackson, produced by aac in association with Disney Channel, has begun in Toronto, bringing the total number of episodes to date to 65.

aac distributes the series worldwide to more than 50 countries, excluding the u.s., and for the first time, the series will air on a Canadian broadcaster – Family Channel.

AAC Kids has also started production on the new, live-action, dramatic series In a Heartbeat.

Inspired by the real-life stories of volunteer Emergency Medical Technician squads, staffed by high-school students, the 21-part, half-hour series stars Shawn Ashmore (X-Men, Animorphs), Reagan Pasternak (Jail Bait, Milgaard), Danso Gordon (Hang Time, Street Cents) and Christopher Ralph (Animorphs, Dear America).

Kevin Laffety is attached to produce.

Directors include Stacey Curtis, Carl Goldstein, Don McBrearty, Larry McLean and Don McCutcheon.

Suzanne French is creative exec and Tracey Dodokin is exec producing.

Other AAC Kids series coming down the pipeline include Yvon of the Yukon, an official Canada/China coproduction by Studio B Productions in Vancouver and Hong Ying in Taiwan.

The 13-part, half-hour series, written by Victor Nicolle, Vito Viscomi and Paul Bellini, and directed by Greg Sullivan, tells the story of a 17th century French explorer who’s been trapped inside a polar ice block for the past 300 years until a dog comes along and releases him.

Blair Peters, Chris Bartleman, Tom Pong and Bobby Hsiah are attached to produce the series, which will air on ytv in the fall.

aac has worldwide distribution, except in the u.s., China and Taiwan.

Old Tom, a 26-part, animated, half-hour series, is coproduced by Australia’s Yoram Gross-em.tv and France’s Millimages.

The series, directed by Guy Gross, follows the peculiar relationship between a prim-and-proper matron and Old Tom, her mischievous cat.

The production features the quirky characters originally created by Leigh Hobbs, one of Australia’s foremost cartoonists, for the book series of the same name.

So far, a Canadian broadcaster is not attached, but the series will air on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Nickelodeon in Australia and France’s tfi in summer/fall 2001.

aac holds merchandising and distribution rights worldwide, excluding Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, French-speaking Africa, Benelux, Eastern Europe and India.

*Sleeping Giant produces high-impact series

From Sleeping Giant Productions, makers of The Genius of Lenny Breau and The Originals, comes Robert B. Parker’s Spenser: Bullets, Love & Beer, a biographical profile of crime-fiction writer Robert Parker for Bravo!

Coproduced with Kaleidoscope Productions, Spenser is a follow-up to Jamie Lee Burke’s Crime and Forgiveness (Bravo!), a profile of the Louisiana crime-fiction writer whose high-voltage dialogue and evocative descriptions spawned Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux. The one-hour special will also serve as a pilot for the proposed crime-fiction writer series, Scenes of the Crime.

‘Our goal is to turn this into a 13-part [one-hour] series that we could pitch to the travel channels or Court tv in the u.s., which does a lot of hard-hitting documentaries but is moving into some of the softer stuff,’ says director Margaret Konopacki (Jamie Lee Burke, Age of e).

Shooting in Toronto and Boston from June 26 to July 17, the one-hour pilot, budgeted at $130,000, will reveal Parker’s motives for choosing specific settings and provide a close-up look at his protagonist, Spenser, and the New England environment where his stories take place.

Part interview and part re-enactment of approximately 15 scenes from Parker’s 20 Spenser novels, the biography is exec produced by Jim Hanley and Randy Zalken.

Kaleidoscope has worldwide distribution.

Mass Appeal is another Sleeping Giant/Kaleidoscope coprod for Bravo! A look inside the culture, personalities and astonishing techniques of some of Canada’s best fringe performing artists, the series attempts to answer the questions: What is performance art? And, is Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart an artist, an athlete, or both?

In exploring such existential dilemmas, the series illuminates the mass appeal of everything from air shows and Marineland to drag queens, wrestlers and buskers.

At the end of August, the production moves to Ottawa to cover a week-long buskers festival. For another episode, a drag queen trio called the B-Girlz performs an original musical-comedy routine.

Shooting for the six-part, half-hour, performing arts/magazine series, budgeted at $240,000, runs June 26 to Aug. 31 throughout Ontario.

Dan Robinson (Spoken Art, Trouble in Mind) is attached to direct, Tiina Soomet is producing, Tanya Arnoti is associate producing and Hanley and Zalken are exec producing.

Also on the Sleeping Giant slate is the 13-part, half-hour series Lives Interrupted, produced for Vision tv and wtn.

The new magazine-style series, which goes to camera July 3 and wraps at the end of October, takes a detailed look at how people recover from life-changing events and transform themselves after suffering from a severe tragedy or adversity. Episodes include stories dealing with rape, incarceration, war, stroke, aids, murder, disease, breast cancer, suicide, sexual abuse and terrorism, all relating to Canadian survivors.

The three-act show, budgeted at $850,000 in total, integrates first-person interviews, dramatic re-enactments and the testimony of experts.

Konopacki and Robinson are attached to direct. Patricia Michael and Soomet are producing and creator Hanley is exec producing.

Great North International has worldwide distribution.

Further down the pipeline, the Toronto-based prodco is in development with The Hunt, a thrilling documentary that combines action-adventure footage with cutting-edge scientific research and asks the question: Is hunting a shameful throwback to a less enlightened time in human survival? Or, is it encoded in our genes?

The one-hour doc is to be produced in association with Discovery Canada.

*A packed production sked for Pebblehut

Pebblehut Productions has wrapped shooting in Toronto on the mow Doc, starring country and western singer Billy Ray Cyrus who leaves his Achy Breaky Heart behind to play in his fourth film in the past year.

Budgeted at just over $2 million, the comedy-drama about the clash of country and city values has Cyrus playing a cowboy boot-wearing doctor from a small Prairie town who lands himself in a large eastern city, where he turns established procedures upside down at a medical clinic.

Directed by George Bloomfield (Due South) and produced by Marilyn Stonehouse for Pax tv in the u.s., the mow, which shot in and around Toronto May 15 to June 10, was penned by brother duo Dave and Gary Johnson.

Canadian actress Claudette Mink costars as Doc’s love interest. Pearson Television International has worldwide distribution.

Currently in production is Pebblehut’s Rivals, a $4.7-million mow based on the true-life story of the murder of a high-school girl in rural Pennsylvania.

Wrapping July 12, the tv movie has been prebought by TMN-The Movie Network and USA Network in the u.s.

Pearson is distributing internationally.

On the service side, Pebblehut is working on the four-hour miniseries Jackie Ethel Joan: The Women of Camelot, shooting in Toronto June 26 to Aug. 24.

Directed by Larry Shaw (Don’t Look Down), produced by Kay Hoffman and exec produced by Sheri Singer of Just Singer Productions of Studio City, Calif., the miniseries is based on J. Randy Taraborrelli’s current bestseller. It provides a new view into the lives of three vastly different women who became Kennedy wives and endured complex relationships with each other and their respective husbands – Jack, Bobby and Teddy.

Jill Hennessy (Law & Order), Lauren Holly (Picket Fences) and Leslie Stefanson (The General’s Daughter) star as the three leads.

The miniseries will air on nbc Nov. 5 and 6, the eve of the 2000 presidential election.

Meanwhile, shooting began last month on the second season of Twice in a Lifetime, with 22 episodes to be broadcast this fall on ctv and Pax.

This year the series stars Paul Popowich (Hardy Boys) and Al Waxman (Power Play), with guest appearances from Lesley Ann Warren, Ralph Macchio (Karate Kid) and Markie Post (Night Court).

Stonehouse and Deborah Nathan are producing.

Episodic directors include Stacey Curtis (The Famous Jett Jackson), Allan King (Leonardo: A Dream of Flight), David Winning (Are You Afraid of the Dark?), Holly Dale (Peter Benchley’s Amazon) and Steve DiMarco (The Ride).

Stephen Brackley and Pamela Long are exec producing.

Shooting wraps in December.

*A horror anthology on a shoestring

Four relatively unknown directors have come together with writer/ producer James Russell to bring to life the Twilight Zone-inspired horror anthology Black Cat.

To be shot in digital video on a shoestring budget of roughly $75,000, the feature-length anthology brings together four stories, each with its own look, its own dop and its own director, but all with the common theme of family and the emotion of fear, says Russell, a former resident with the Canadian Film Centre and an Ontario Hydro customer rep by day.

Directors attached are Lewis Baumander, Tracey Izatt, Marina Prospero and Joe Pryce.

The four stories are as follows: Simon in Mourning is about an 82-year-old woman who still sleeps with her husband who died six months earlier; Dust focuses on an alcoholic struggling to prevent his family from dying as a result of a volcanic eruption that happened in another dimension and killed the carbon copy of his family; Siege concerns a family of four who have trapped themselves in their house for five years only to find they’ve finally run out of water; and Hopscotch is about an eight-year-old girl who wakes up one morning to find everyone gone.

So far, the production, shooting Oct. 20 to Nov. 11, does not have a broadcaster, but Russell says he’s actively seeking licence fees to help finance post-production.

Russell raised the funding privately, and to help keep costs down, he is paying each crew member and the 25-member cast $100.