Vancouver: Year-over-year volume and value are up for B.C. production, so far. At press time, 13 features were prepping or in production, with five starts in March-April and the balance gearing up for May-June.
Among the new titles is Final Cut, a Lions Gate Films feature with Robin Williams in the lead and service-produced by Vancouver’s Ogden Gavanski.
The script, to be shot for less than $10 million, is a near-future story about a society that implants chips in people’s brains to record their lives through their eyes.

Vancouver: Television series Da Vinci’s Inquest and feature Flower & Garnet dominated the 2003 Leo Awards nominations announced April 16.

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.

Vancouver: Peace Arch Entertainment, recently restructured and reinvented as a genre feature producer, is back in business with four feature films, with aggregate budgets of about $35 million, and a television series.

War and pestilence haven’t yet had an apocalyptic impact on Canada’s film and television production volumes – U.S. producers are more interested in the ongoing ACTRA contract negotiations – but protracted assaults on both Iraq and the killer pneumonia SARS could curb the long-term production trends.

While war in Iraq kept some Americans away and SARS fears kept the Japanese grounded at home, the French broadcasters were doing business at MIPTV 2003, held March 24-28 in Cannes, which netted a $200,000 deal for Toronto distributor Oasis International.

Vancouver: When actor Jennifer Lopez sashays into Kamloops for the Miramax feature An Unfinished Life, the B.C. taxpayer will pay for one out of every seven days of hotels and per diems for the drama’s 150 crew members.

Vancouver: The West Coast post-production industry was looking for a little industry shakeup when it started lobbying the B.C. government for a visual effects tax credit.

Vancouver: Production on the second season of Warner Bros.’ digital 2D animated series Mucha Lucha begins in May at Vancouver’s Bardel Entertainment.

With the injection of $145 million in new capital and an ambitious rollout of services scheduled for the fall, Calgary-based Craig Broadcast Systems is reorganizing its conventional and specialty operations under the brand name Craig Media Inc.

Vancouver: The B.C. Supreme Court system will determine whether Vancouver filmmaker John Pozer, who directed The Grocer’s Wife, is right to be Kissed off by former business partner and common-law spouse Lynne Stopkewich.

Vancouver: Keystone Entertainment, producer of a menagerie of animal features such as Air Bud and the upcoming snowboarding chimp feature MXP: Most Extreme Primate, is hoping for some cost savings on its new feature Spymate by previewing eight action sequences with ‘animatics’ – or animated storyboards.
A new-ish trend in production, animatics was used in Panic Room by director David Fincher to turn static storyboards into full-motion previews of how the action and camera would move through various scenes.