Advertising executive-turned-writer/director Bill Keenan has lured the seasoned acting chops of The Newsroom’s Peter Keleghan and Leah Pinsent and Little Mosque on the Prairie’s Neil Crone to his first feature film production, Eating Buccaneers.

Montreal: The latest screen adaptation of Jules Verne’s fantasy Journey to the Center of the Earth, filmed most famously in Twentieth Century Fox’s 1959 version, is getting the 3D treatment.

While new media appears limitless, delegates attending the ICE 2007 conference were thinking small – and not just screen size. Smaller communities of consumers with similar interests are breaking out from the larger social settings such as YouTube and MySpace, and delegates were told the future of online programming is to target programming to these niche groups.

Round two of the Great Canadian Video Game Search hands cheques to four titles at opening of the ICE conference in Toronto

The eighth annual KidScreen Summit was ablaze with activity, literally, as 1,367 executives from the children’s entertainment world converged in New York last week to analyze the future of the industry and, on day one, to flee an electrical fire and flood in the Sheraton Hotel & Towers.

Finding the right balance between TV and new media challenges producers at children’s entertainment confab

New three-year pact between CCI Entertainment and Seven24 includes two MOWs and the tween-aimed sitcom Stuck in the Middle

Following last month’s NATPE convention in Las Vegas, Degrassi: The Next Generation is just 10% away from its goal of reaching U.S. syndication by September.

Nominations for the Daytime Emmys children categories will help kick off this year’s KidScreen Summit, when the eighth annual kids entertainment conference meets this month at the Sheridan New York Hotel & Towers in NYC Feb. 7-9.

Noted documentarian Lindalee Tracey lost her long battle with cancer earlier this month and died at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital just as a long-developing pet project went to camera for CBC.

Since the Ottawa International Animation Festival first launched 30 years ago, the North American animation industry has shifted gears from producing for TV and film to creating customizable content for many screens, including broadband, iPods and mobile phones. And the 2006 OIAF looks to guide the delegates through this new media landscape.

OIAF artistic director Chris Robinson admits it’s difficult to narrow down the films in competition at this year’s fest, but points to a number of possible buzz-makers.