To keep its awards shows light and glamorous, all the Academy need do is continue giving prizes to Wendy Crewson.

To the big foreign productions that have shot on Canadian soil, Toronto has basically been a one-horse town in terms of lab services. That is, until global giant Technicolor staked its claim in Hogtown, acquiring Command Post and Transfer, including its Toybox video and audio post and alphacine Toronto and Vancouver lab operations.

Toronto: Macabre-meister David Cronenberg has just begun prepro on the drama A History of Violence, by far his biggest production to date. The Toronto filmmaker will be helming Viggo Mortensen (Hidalgo, the Lord of the Rings trilogy) in the feature financed by New Line Cinema.

Starting this fall, the Toronto International Film Festival will replace its venerable Perspective Canada program with two new fest showcases of Canuck cinema, in a bid to keep up with the growing international profile of top domestic filmmakers.

Alliance Atlantis Communications and Michael Moore are back in business. AAC’s motion picture distribution group snagged the Canadian rights to the pot-stirring doc director’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d’Or at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Through its now-defunct Salter Street Films, Alliance Atlantis had a hand in producing Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, and released it in Canada to $5.8 million at the box office, a record for a doc.

Nuts-and-bolts services such as processing, formatting, conversion and duplication might not seem the most glamorous aspects of post-production, but Canadian shops are finding them increasingly useful in terms of luring major Hollywood productions and landing more creative gigs. Plus they allow companies to better weather the storm of volatile production volumes, representing a large chunk of the bottom line.

The great Toronto post-production shuffle continues as post facility Magnetic North has acquired cross-town rival Casablanca from Alliance Atlantis Communications.

Legendary Canadian actor/writer/director Gordon Pinsent will receive the Banff Television Festival’s Award of Excellence on June 13, as part of the fest’s 25th anniversary celebrations. The award recognizes ‘exceptional achievement through a body of work over an extended period of time’.

The high-definition rollout continues to cover the Canadian map, with CTV launching CTV HD West, a new national HD feed for broadcast through Bell ExpressVu, on June 1. The station offers the same programming lineup as Vancouver’s CTV British Columbia, presenting true HD content when available, with analog shows digitally ‘upconverted.’

As recently as a couple of months ago, Alex Olegnowicz, president of Toronto’s Imarion Post Production, noted pessimism among his clients, not to mention several shows not going forward. ‘The market is way tighter,’ he told Playback then, citing the impact of the drop in the federal government’s annual Canadian Television Fund allotment. But now, with the feds having restored their contribution to $100 million a year for the next two years, a dark cloud has lifted.

Calibre Digital Pictures has an ‘Evel’ production in its midst, as in Evil Knievel, a Turner Network Television MOW about the 1970s car-jumping daredevil extraordinaire. The Toronto animation and FX shop is in production on the movie based on the life of Knievel, who launched his motorcycle stunt career in 1965, drawing ever-bigger crowds for his (barely) death-defying feats.

The Independent Production Fund’s investment in Canadian drama in 2003 totaled $2.2 million, down 12% from $2.5 million the year before, according to the IPF’s recently released annual report. The fund also contributed $217,000 to professional development, down 27% from $296,350 in 2002.