Equinoxe shoots first feature in Rwanda

Whizbang takes Break

They shoot horses, don’t they?

The Toronto wing of Women in Film and Television has paired with Telefilm Canada to assist homegrown producing talent and, through their new Media Entrepreneur Incubator program, have brought producers from nine companies to the entertainment law firm of Heenan Blaikie LLP.

It was nearly one year ago that post-production giant Technicolor acquired struggling local player Command Post and Transfer, and in so doing grabbed a foothold in English Canada’s two largest markets. The past few months have seen Technicolor busy with the labor-intensive task of bringing the facilities it picked up in the deal – the Toybox video and audio post outfits and alphacine labs in Toronto and Vancouver – on par with its other locations. It is all a crucial part of a global strategy for the company, which celebrates its 90th birthday this year.

With Toronto gearing up for a busy summer of guest production, Deluxe Sound & Picture expects to be up and running on the cutting edge of video post by mid-June.

Tattersall and friends bring home a BAFTA

It was on his way to NAB2005 in Las Vegas that Alex Olegnowicz, president of Toronto post shop Imarion, received an elated phone call from local filmmaker Stuart Samuels. Samuels had just heard that his documentary about 1970s cult flicks, Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, had just been accepted at the Cannes Film Festival.

Summer’s nearly here, meaning the local multiplex will be bursting with blockbuster tales of futuristic worlds and caped crusaders. And for the past several years, many of the biggest of these fantasy films have been produced in Vancouver. The same can be said of the small screen, with nets such as Sci Fi Channel in the U.S. shooting its most popular shows in B.C. All these producers are taking advantage of the city’s inherent advantages and the infrastructure that has blossomed since the mid-1990s.

Building a state-of-the-art studio facility in Regina was a bit of a gamble, but it’s already paying off with a dramatic jump in local production. Meanwhile, Alberta may be looking to build a comparable studio in the Calgary area over the next two years, and the Manitoba government just purchased the province’s only all-season studio.

All of Vancouver’s major studio facilities are booked solid right through summer, a situation few would have anticipated six months ago, when the local production biz was in the middle of what appeared to be a serious slump.

A slow cycle for feature films and drama series accounts for a precipitous 18% drop in Canadian production spending in 2004, according to results from Playback’s 17th Annual Report on Independent Production.