Shaftesbury Films is slated to shoot $81.5 million of film and television in 2008 – a significant jump from its $57-million production volume in 2007 – according to company projections.

New productions include the US$13-million large-format picture The Greatest Journey (billed as the world’s first Muslim-based IMAX film), chronicling the annual trek to Mecca by followers of the Muslim faith. Company president and co-CEO Jonathan Barker is currently overseeing the shoot in Saudi Arabia.

Co-CEO Christina Jennings was also forging ‘foreign’ partnerships this month. Speaking from Hollywood, she told Playback that the prodco has inked a deal with Disney Channel (and Family Channel in Canada) for new kids series High Court (26 x 30), which will likely be ‘shot in two batches’ of 13 episodes, starting in January in Toronto.

Jennings also met with NBC, but said it was premature to discuss titles. However, the slate budget total includes projections for a network series.

High Court ‘is basically a situation where kids in school adjudicate kid issues,’ Jennings explains. ‘It’s based on a real situation that’s starting in the world. We focus on one 16-year-old teenage boy called Coop…he becomes ‘the prosecutor’.’ Casting is underway.

High Court’s budget will be ‘in the same range’ as Shaftesbury’s family series Life with Derek, which just wrapped its fourth and final season for Family after 70 eps.

Two Life with Derek MOWs will continue that franchise (starting with one about summer camp) for The Movie Network and Movie Central.

The prodco is also skedded to shoot Diverted, a CBC MOW about 9/11, in June in Newfoundland. ‘It’s about the airplanes that were diverted on Sept. 11 to Newfoundland,’ says Jennings. Paul Pope is attached as a producer.

The projected slate also includes shows in development awaiting a green light, such as season two of The Murdoch Mysteries (13 x 60), with Grenada International handling foreign sales. Citytv is the local broadcaster of season one.

Jason Sherman is scripting the 8 x 60 series Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, based on the Giller Prize-winning book by Vincent Lam, for TMN/MC. Michelle Marion, director, Canadian independent production at TMN, describes the series, set in a big-city emergency ward, as the ‘the unexpected, almost metaphoric journey of doctors dealing with powerful internal conflict.’

There’s another IMAX film in development, Flight of the Butterflies, and another MOW, about Halloween, featuring the lead character from Booky Makes Her Mark for CBC, with Platt Productions and Peter Moss attached to direct.

John L’Ecuyer is also developing a new series called Notebooks on Euphoria, about drugs and their effects from the insider perspective, reminiscent of the filmmaker’s feature Curtis’s Charm.

-With files from Marc Glassman