Montreal: After touring the film-festival circuit with his first two features, Summer (2002) and Hatley High (2003), Montreal-based filmmaker Phil Price found plenty of inspiration for comedy.

Almost 60 years ago, the radio arts program at Ryerson University in Toronto became the first place in Canada to broadcast a television signal to the rest of the country. The school of Radio and Television Arts has again made a quantum leap into the future with a complete hi-def studio makeover, new media labs and live Internet streaming.

Winnipeg’s National Screen Institute – Canada and VisionTV have selected a half-dozen writers to their collaborative DiverseTV training program. The initiative offers visible minority and aboriginal writers the opportunity to develop a TV series for broadcast on Vision.

CanWest Global has donated $1 million to the University of Western Ontario’s information and media studies program. The money, to be paid out in installments over five years, will establish the David Vienneau Scholarship – named for Global Television’s late Ottawa bureau chief, himself a graduate of Western – and the CanWest Global Fellowship in Media at the London, ON-based school.

Slawko Klymkiw has big plans for the Canadian Film Centre, and they involve the institution stepping out of its role as educator and helping the production community work with new technologies.

The Vancouver Film School is going into business with entertainment lawyer Jeff Young, who will serve as department head for a new diploma program launching in March that will focus on preparing students for what the school refers to as the ‘new era of the business professional.’

In the interest of getting them while they’re young, Toronto software developer Alias is organizing a contest aimed at recognizing students who demonstrate ‘exceptional creativity and skill’ at design.

Kris Holden-Ried and Samantha Weinstein star in the short film Big Girl, written and directed by Renuka Jeyapalan during her stay at the Canadian Film Centre last year. The short will screen at the Berlin International Film Festival, which unspools February 9-19. The bittersweet comedy-drama, about a young girl who gives her mother’s new boyfriend a hard time, won the $10,000 Bravo!FACT award for best Canuck short at TIFF.

The first full season of sitcom hopeful The Jane Show is expected to re-debut on Global within the year – again with creator and comic Teresa Pavlinek in the lead, but with almost none of the supporting cast seen in the 2005 pilot.
Only Pavlinek and Kate Trotter ­- who plays boss to her befuddled, office-bound single-gal-in-the-city, Jane Black – survived the yearlong retooling process, says producer Adam Haight of Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films.

For politicians and reporters alike, it was hard to get the attention of the public during the first, pre-holiday phase of the election. Viewership of the first French and English debates was weak – although the more civil format went over well – and it was just plain harder, thanks to snowstorms and such, to get news crews from Point A to Point B.

All drama funding will move to broadcaster envelopes, and the CBC will receive nearly 40% of all available funds, if proposed changes at the Canadian Television Fund become official later this month.

The proposed changing of the guard at Bell Globemedia could lead to a new, $130-mllion fund for TV programming, if the CRTC approves the transaction and if it considers the multimedia company to be under new management.