CHUM Ltd. has acquired a 40% equity stake in Toronto-based Sleeping Giant Productions, a producer of arts, education and spiritual programming.

Sleeping Giant has announced plans to produce a new 13 half-hour magazine series, The Age of e, which president and ceo Jim Hanley says will nourish ‘mind, body and spirit.’ The series, to be produced in association with Piggy Back Productions and Winstar TV & Video for Vision tv and Wisdom tv in the u.s., is scheduled to air January 2000.

Sleeping Giant’s ’99/2000 production slate includes 86 new hours of programming, some of which is licensed to Space: The Imagination Station and Bravo!

Hanley says the partnership with chum will enable Sleeping Giant to finance a larger volume of production and will offer the company access to the international market. He says no formal first-look agreement is in place yet between the two, and decisions will be made on a project-by-project basis on whether Chum International will distribute Sleeping Giant projects.

Hanley says the prodco ‘made a decision about a year and a half ago to grow the company and aggressively market it internationally, because one of the things we wanted to do was to free ourselves from the chaotic tyranny of the Canadian funds. It’s not that we don’t want to take advantage of those funds, but the rules change, and more and more people are lining up for them, and our product tends to be international.’

In Playback’s May 17 Report on Independent Production, Sleeping Giant reported its 1998 volume of production and development at just under $5 million.