Edmonton: It’s 7:15 a.m. and the live Big Breakfast weekday morning show is underway at A-Channel’s bright yellow, red and blue studio. Pedestrians glue their faces to the all-window front and gaze into the hubbub of the working newsroom. A banner hangs from the ceiling announcing the seven-month-young station’s branding as a ‘very independent channel.’

Street-level local news and entertainment the likes of the 7-9 a.m. breakfast show is a big push in Craig Broadcasting’s strategy to take a bite of the Alberta market share from longtime staples wic-owned itv, Baton’s cfrn and the local cbc outlet.

In the primetime weekday 8-10 p.m. slot, where its competitors parade an array of sitcoms and drama series, A-Channel aims to differentiate itself with an all-movie lineup offering Hollywood blockbusters and, to the benefit of homegrown producers, indigenous Alberta fare.

Since signing on, the A-Channel Drama Fund has prebought 12 films worth $3 million in licence fees and representing $35 million in production budgets from Alberta producers.

Over the next seven years, a total of $11.8 million has been earmarked for indigenous dramatic product, with A-Channel buying Canadian rights which it in turn sublicenses to national broadcasters.

‘We are targeting smack down the middle of the 18-to-54 demographic,’ says Drew Craig, president of Craig Broadcast Alberta of A-Channel’s news and primetime block, noting that the average age of Calgary residents is 31. ‘The established stations tend to be more traditional and skew older in approach. We see a real opportunity to capitalize on the younger viewer.’

Craig is banking on feeding audience appetite for long-form dramas, a strategy that worked successfully at its Winnipeg station mtn, which jumped from the fourth-ranked station in primetime to number one when it switched to the prime ticket movie format.

‘It showed us that if you specialize in one area you differentiate yourself from the competition and viewers relate to your station as a brand they can rely on for a certain type of programming,’ says Craig.

A-Channel entered its first ratings sweep after a mere five weeks on air, and at the onset of the launch of a new tier of specialty channels. Still, the Edmonton station’s figures were solid, says James Haskins, gm of Edmonton’s A-Channel.

Up against Baton’s dramatic series product on cfrn and CanWest Global’s primetime block purchased by itv, A-Channel’s prime ticket movies scored a 3.4 rating as compared to itv’s 6.8, cfrn’s 5.8 and cbc’s 1.8 score in the 18-to-49 demographic, according to Micro bbc scores in the central market area. A-Channel’s late-night news picked up a 2.1 rating while itv’s scored a 3.0, cfrn picked up a 1.1 and cbc a 0.2 rating.

‘One of the encouraging things is we got on the board in virtually all the day parts,’ adds Craig. ‘Viewers were sampling from The Big Breakfast to the late-night news to the Saturday morning kids’ block. The A-Channel was garnering an audience in every time block.’

The next ratings book, due out early May, will be a far more telling survey of how the A-Channel is doing in a competitive marketplace.

In the meantime, competition for morning news audiences is heating up. Since Big Breakfast launched, itv (with the top-rated morning, supper-hour and late-night newscast in the market) has added an extra hour to its 6-8 a.m. morning news program, now broadcast until 9 a.m. Channel 7 was taping its morning show the night before but has gone back to a live show.

A block of strip programming (Frasier, Friends, Simpsons) takes viewers from the 6 p.m. half-hour supper newscast and leads them into the 8 p.m. prime ticket movie.

A-Channel has committed to broadcast 26 original Canadian long-form dramas in each broadcast year. Its conditions of licence restrict foreign films to six per week and only three during peak viewing hours. Canadian drama must account for a weekly average of 4.5 hours.

The movie lineup targets the range of audiences – from family fare slotted Sunday nights at 7 p.m. and Saturday afternoons to a more mature audience targeted in the 8-10 p.m. block Monday to Saturday night and 9 p.m. Sundays.

The beauty of the movie format, says Craig, is the ability to appeal to a wide cross-section of audiences. The projects out of the gate through the drama fund cover a wide territory.

A-Channel fund executive director Joanne Levy says the fund greenlights projects across the board from edgy, dark films to contemporary comedies and action-adventures.

Calgary producer Bruce Harvey of Illusions Entertainment picked up A-Channel licences on two thrillers, the legal suspense film Question of Privilege and The Silent Cradle, a film about a shady adoption agency directed by Paul Ziler and starring Lorraine Bracco (Goodfellas), R.H. Thomson, John Herd and Margot Kidder. Silent Cradle is being distributed in Canada by Cineplex Odeon and has pay-tv as a first broadcast window. David Shultz is the writer on both projects.

Historic adventure is the hook of The Mad Trapper, a retelling of the 1930s tale of infamous Albert Johnson who shot a Mountie and eluded capture for two months despite a posse of Mounties and military on his trail. Edmonton producer Lorne McPherson is seeking a Canadian distributor for the $3.6-million project, being written by Governor General Award-winning novelist Rudy Wiebe (Discovery of Strangers) and slated for a winter ’98 shoot.

Quebec novelist Gabrielle Roi’s Children of My Heart is being adapted into a $3.6-million film by Toronto’s Keith Ross Leckie. Set in the Prairies during the Depression, the love story follows a French-Canadian teacher who moves to Manitoba and falls in love with her 15-year-old Metis student. Peter Ihotka in Edmonton and Toronto coproducer Mary Young Leckie are scheduled to shoot the film next fall, with Alliance distributing internationally.

A $3-million Alberta/b.c. coproduction, Heart of the Sun from Makara Pictures and Ennerdale Films, traces the history of eugenics in Alberta and features Christianne Hirt, Shaun Johnston, Michael Riley and Graham Greene.

John Hazlett of Calgary’s Red Devil Films will shoot the feature Bad Money this summer, with A-Channel and Vancouver distributor Red Sky Entertainment as a big piece of the financing pie. The ‘dark comedy about middle-class desperation’ is written by Hazlett and Blake Brooker and will ring in at the $1-million mark.

Production is underway on Minds Eye’s $3-million tv movie Bad Prospect, an Alfred Hitchcock-style suspense thriller written by John Hopkins and directed by Stuart Margolin. Harry Hamlin of L.A. Law and Rebecca Jenkins star. A-Channel has sublicensed the first window rights to Showtime and Hallmark is the foreign distributor.

Josh Miller at Minds Eye’s Alberta office has a feature in development with the A-Channel as well.

Calgary’s Bradshaw, MacLeod & Associates picked up a presale on Bad Faith, based on an Ian Adams novel of the same title. The gritty psychological police thriller is being directed by Randy Bradshaw. Talks are underway with u.k. broadcasters and distributors.

A development envelope in the drama fund is worth $920,000 over seven years, of which $75,000 is available in each of the first two years.

With A-Channel money, Edmonton’s Blue Sky Communications is developing The Cartoonist, a tv movie based on the stage play by David Clarke, who is adapting the screenplay with Norm Fastbender.

Hazlett has nabbed development funding for The Buzz, which he describes as ‘a biting send-up of entertainment journalism.’ The $3-million film is at second draft script stage.