Vancouver: Kirk Shaw’s Insight Film Studios has rocketed to the top of the Canadian production biz, but the shop’s non-union approach to making films and TV shows may soon be coming to an end, if IATSE has its way.

If you are the parent of a tween, you probably can’t help but know more than you want to about High School Musical, the syrupy Disney made-for-TV mega-hit (dubbed ‘Grease without the dirty parts’ by one dad) that aired in Canada last year on Family Channel.

Thelma Schoonmaker represents half of one of cinema’s most celebrated partnerships between a director and an editor, having worked on every Martin Scorsese title since 1980’s Raging Bull, which garnered the 67-year-old her first Academy Award. Twenty-seven years and two additional Oscars later (The Aviator, The Departed), the graceful Schoonmaker reflects on meeting the director at New York University in the 1960s, and fondly remembers her husband, legendary British director Michael Powell. She and Scorsese are currently working on restoring films by Powell and his partner Emeric Pressburger, including 1948’s The Red Shoes.

They say there’s no such thing as TV seasons anymore – that summer is as must-see as the fall or May sweeps – but the evidence of our local listings suggests otherwise. There seem to be just as many reruns as before, and they’re a poor substitute for, let’s say, a new season of Frontline. And so, not for the first time, we ask:

• Sun TV has picked up Aliens in America, a CW sitcom, similar to CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie, about a Muslim foreign-exchange student living with a family in Wisconsin.

• Peter Viner has retired from CanWest MediaWorks, ending 33 years with the TV and print giant and its parent CanWest Global Communications. Viner, 61, oversaw the media conglomerate’s broadcast and publishing properties, which include Global Television, the CH channels, eight specialty channels, the National Post, and daily and weekly newspapers across the country. A replacement is not being sought at this time. He will continue to serve as an advisor for CanWest.

The television medium can learn from its own history when mapping out its digital future.

Whether it makes you bolt for the vomitorium or head for moral high ground, horror is big business for the entertainment industry.

From saving the environment to cyber-carpentry, the game projects that have made it to the final four in Telefilm Canada’s Great Canadian Video Game Competition are anything but average. In a risk-averse industry that tends to crank out games based on proven models, the judges were looking for something new.

Almost six years after it was pitched in the wake of Sept. 11, The Border has gone to camera for CBC’s midseason slate. The series, a high-action drama that follows Canadian agents on the front line of immigration policing, has a lot of things ‘blowing up and high production values,’ according to executive producer Peter Raymont, ‘but it has a conscience,’ too.

Don’t lump Critical Incident, a new pilot by Pink Sky Entertainment for CTV, in with other cop dramas. It’s anything but, according to exec producer Anne Marie La Traverse.