With the Bessies upon us and the focus on the craft of making commercials, it is time for Canada’s top helmers to once again take centre stage. It is no coincidence that the names associated with many of the year’s top spots are ones we know well. They are the directors who have managed their careers for the long haul and continue to find success years after breaking in. But what are their secrets? On The Spot reporter Laura Bracken went directly to the source and asked a few of the nation’s top directors how they have sustained their long and winding careers.
Working in a variety of markets and mediums is a key element to becoming a successful commercial director, but sometimes it’s the work you don’t do that can make or break a career. Canada’s top commercial directors have to be very selective when choosing their spots in order to develop the distinctive styles that generate successful, lasting careers.

After 19 years in operation and producing 863 commercials, one of the longest surviving animation studios in Canada, Toronto’s Animation House, officially closed its doors on April 15 in the wake of poor market conditions and corporate management mishaps.
‘In its heyday it was the pre-eminent commercial production and animation house in Canada,’ says executive producer and general manager Michael Crabtree, who was with Animation House throughout its final years. ‘A lot of people in the animation industry at one point or another passed through the doors of Animation House.’

This summer a worldwide audience may be able to watch a bevy of TV network broadcasts, including Global Television and CBC, free over the Internet at iCraveTV.biz, the newest incarnation of the controversial retransmitter set to launch June 1.
Although Herbert Becker, president of iCraveTV.biz, says he does not expect any resistance, early indications suggest broadcasters and copyright interests will come down on Becker with the same force as they did on the original iCraveTV.com, which was shut down by the courts just after it launched in 1999.

Based on a play by Cape Breton Island’s Daniel MacIvor, with an almost entirely local cast, Marion Bridge is the first feature for both Bill Niven’s Halifax-based Idlewild Films and for Toronto director Wiebke von Carolsfeld. Coproduced with Toronto’s Sienna Films, it wraps five weeks of shooting primarily in Halifax at the end of May.
‘Our director is a dream,’ says Niven, who was initially concerned about working with a first-timer. ‘She wants to be involved in every detail along the way and has a very keen sense of aesthetics.’

It looks like a Merchant Ivory film complete with grand manor estates, Victorian costumes, corset-clad women slapping men in the face and dramatic storytelling so convincing that for a second you actually believe you’re watching a trailer for ‘the world’s first 48-hour epic movie made by women for women.’
In reality, director Martin Granger’s ‘Sin and Sentimentality,’ produced by Toronto’s Avion Films for agency Downtown Partners, aired across Canada in Famous Players cinemas as a mock trailer. It was part of a campaign Granger directed for Labatt-brewed Bud Light.
For his efforts, Granger was honored with a best of series nod at the 2002 Bessies in the directors category.

For Barry Peterson, cinematography started out as a childhood hobby, but he always knew it would become his career. Peterson was 13 when movies like Star Wars fuelled his dream of working behind the camera. ‘I was a kid with a Super 8 camera and it all evolved from there,’ he says.

Whether he’s editing with Final Cut Pro on his laptop from a street corner in Rome or conducting interviews from a bar in Miami, the winner of the 2002 Bessie for Best of Series in editing does not spend most of his time locked away in an edit suite. Peter McAuley, known for his effects-driven editing, is on set, working with directors and DOPs on the production level supervising FX.

When David Baxter was a Ryerson Radio & Television Arts student, he spent a week shadowing Toronto commercial producer Bob Schulz for a school project, which ended up helping Baxter secure his first industry job as a projectionist screening rushes for Schulz Productions.

A packed house at the Toronto premiere of director Nisha Pahuja’s first film Bollywood Bound brought Hot Docs 2002 to a close on Sunday, May 5, marking the end of a highly lucrative event for Canadian doc makers, broadcasters and distributors alike.
This year’s international documentary festival, held in Toronto April 26 to May 5, was the largest on record, expanding by three days from last year in response to growing public and industrial interest. The number of registered industry delegates rose from 1,400 last year to 1,542 this year and the Toronto Documentary Forum added more than 20 registered delegates, growing to 288 from 261 in 2001. One hundred and forty-nine commissioning editors, acquisition executives and distributors, with more than 100 screenings to select from and 1,130 additional films available from the Doc Shop, make Hot Docs a key documentary marketplace.

The Last Just Man, a Canadian production from Alan Mendelsohn, directed by Steven Silver, was the only film recognized twice at the Hot Docs festival’s closing-night awards ceremony on Sunday, May 5, receiving the Audience Award and the Humanitarian Award. The film is about a Canadian haunted by his experiences commanding UN peacekeeping operations in Rwanda before the 1994 massacre of 800,000 Tutsis.

What is a documentary? As the Canadian non-fiction market grows, so does confusion surrounding the definition of documentary. The evolving genre has come to encompass a wide variety of non-fiction formats that compete for funding, but it’s the traditional doc that is struggling.

In response to tremendous growth in the number of broadcast windows and the further globalization of the TV market, documentary producers, distributors and broadcasters are becoming increasingly involved in the series format and high-end programming. Canadian doc makers are also looking more than ever for projects that will attract international coproducers and multiple broadcasters.