Each year, the Banff Television Festival offers TV and new media professionals the opportunity to attend intimate sessions hosted by some of the world’s premier content creators. The Master Classes bring in international guests to discuss their experiences in the biz and offer informed advice on a wide range of craft and industry topics.

Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films begins production in July on Hemingway and Callaghan, a four-hour miniseries for the CBC directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, hot off his Trudeau success. Set in the 1920s, the mini tracks the young Ernest Hemingway and Canadian Morley Callaghan as they transition from Toronto Star correspondents to novelists.
The shoot will take place in Toronto and Paris, where Hemingway was sent as a correspondent and where he met the likes of Fitzgerald, Joyce and Pound, who influenced his career path. The story also centres on how Hemingway helped Callaghan get his stories published and how the two ended up in a famed boxing match.

The hit CBC series The Newsroom brought Toronto director of photography Joan Hutton one of her biggest successes, including a Gemini Award. So it was a no-brainer when show writer/director/actor Ken Finkleman asked her if she wanted to return to lens the long-awaited follow-up, Newsroom: The Movie, a two-hour TV movie picking up where the sardonic dramedy left off.

The following is a list of winners at the 2002 Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards. The nominees were feted recently at a celebration in Toronto.

It’s been five years since Ken Finkleman’s series The Newsroom stormed onto CBC airwaves. Those pining for the cynical satire will be ecstatic to learn that Newsroom: The Movie is currently in production at CBC studios in Toronto.
The two-hour MOW, which offers more nasty goings-on behind the scenes in a TV newsroom, reunites many characters from the series, including Finkleman as neurotic news director George Findlay and Jeremy Hotz and Karen Hines as news producers. Leah Pinsent’s reporter/anchor character from Finkleman’s More Tears series crosses over, and new cast members include Christian Potenza, Reagan Pasternak and John Neville.

The sets for I Love Mummy are so bright you gotta wear shades. The color palette of rooms in the home of the Barnes family, whose misadventures are the focus of the teen/tween sitcom, incorporates yellow walls and red couches, giving it a style quite apart from your average Canuck series.

The dollar totals spent on indigenous Canadian film and TV production in 2001 were down in each of the three major centres – 2% in Quebec, 10% in Ontario and an estimated 30% in B.C. Yet it is difficult to slot these figures into any kind of general trend, as they come after years of growth and an out-of-the-ordinary 12 months last year.

After spending 2001 packaging and marketing the previous year’s output, Toronto prodco GFT Entertainment is in the midst of a hectic production schedule on the features Crime Spree, Absolon and Partners in Action, all of which are Canada/U.K. coprods shooting in Toronto.
The three films are coproduced with the U.K.’s Studio Eight, with international distribution from L.A.’s Hannibal Pictures and Canadian distribution from Alliance Atlantis. Credited producers are GFT president/CEO Gary Howsam, Studio Eight’s Jamie Brown and Hannibal’s Richard Rionda Del Castro.

Although many in the broadcast community feel that all the hype about convergence a couple of years ago was just that, the subject was centre stage again at NAB2002, the annual meeting of the U.S. National Association of Broadcasters and the world’s largest electronic media show. The convention took place April 6-11 in Las Vegas.

What is most surprising about Trudeau is that, given it covers a subject of great reverence to many Canadians, cinematographer Norayr Kasper and director Jerry Ciccoritti were able to shoot it in such idiosyncratic fashion. The $7.65-million Big Motion Pictures two-part miniseries that aired on CBC is ripe with stylistic flourishes. Kasper dismisses any criticism of whatever artistic licence he and his director took to tell the story.

Las Vegas: The international broadcast industry is experiencing tough economic times, and it is going to take an accelerated adoption of digital television to bring business around. This was the message at NAB2002, the annual gathering of the U.S. National Association of Broadcasters and the world’s largest electronic media show.
Since last year’s conference, the interactive sector has not pulled out of the doldrums of the dot-com stock crash, and innovations in the broadcast world have been put on hold following an economic downturn worsened by 9/11.
By the same token, U.S. broadcasting’s coverage of the terrorist acts perpetrated against the nation and its subsequent response was hailed as ‘our finest hour’ by NAB president and CEO Eddie Fritts in the event’s opening ceremony. He noted that four times more U.S. viewers tuned in to free over-the-air networks than cable stations. ‘Free over-the-air serves the public good,’ he said.

After two years of collaboration, Toronto doc prodcos Infinite Monkeys and MicroTainment Plus have joined forces to create DocuTainment Productions, a TV and film company focusing on factual entertainment. Howard Bernstein of Infinite Monkeys says the move will simplify dealings with broadcasters and financiers. MicroTainment will continue as the company’s drama/entertainment arm.
Military Machines will go to camera on seven episodes in June for Discovery. A coproduction with New Brunswick’s Dreamsmith Entertainment, the show is based in Moncton, NB, and will shoot internationally, tracing the technology of warfare through the ages. Chris Terry produces on a budget of $2.8 million. The series will air after January.