The uproar caused by Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at last year’s Super Bowl triggered an unprecedented outcry – from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, if from few others.

‘It was one of my best experiences in filmmaking,’ says veteran British director of photography Chris Seager of his gig lensing the Canada/U.K. supernatural thriller White Noise.

Before Canadian Adventure Productions president Ben Webster took his 35-member climbing team and production crew on the expedition for Ultimate Survival: Everest, a six-hour miniseries for Discovery Channel Canada, he knew exactly what he’d be up against.

Canon’s new XL2 miniDV camcorder builds on the manufacturer’s success with the XL1 and XL1S models, and, according to the company, is a far more filmmaker-friendly production tool.

The two major film stock manufacturers have new color negative stocks for filmmakers.

With each passing year, the image-capture options available to filmmakers expand.

Toronto director of photography David Greene (Siblings) has been nominated for a 2005 Independent Spirit Award for best cinematography. Greene got the nod for his work on the Toronto-shot FX Networks cable movie Redemption, starring Jamie Foxx, who received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.

For Canadian news consumers, the devastating Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami in Asia and Africa has led to a flurry of media coverage that will likely continue until at least the end of January. More than two dozen Canadian journalists and supporting crew have been reporting from the affected countries since Dec. 26. And while the newsroom chiefs have kept an eye on the rising costs of the extensive coverage, the media outlets have been focused on the enormous human story and galvanizing relief efforts at home.

Now that he’s got it, Serge Bellerose still isn’t sure what to do with Toronto 1. But that’s okay, he says, no rush. There won’t be any real changes at the struggling station until fall, which gives him and the other brass at Quebecor a bit of time to figure out what went wrong and how to set it right.

Vancouver: Brightlight Pictures, one of the busiest service producers on the West Coast, is threatening to move almost US$100 million in feature productions to Ontario over the next few months because of that province’s newly improved tax credits.
The US$50-million videogame-turned-thriller Dungeon Siege, in the works for Boll KG of Germany, could save ‘hundreds of thousands’ by going east, says Brightlight partner Shawn Williamson.

Quebec jumped into the tax-credit ring late in December by upping credits for foreign productions to 20% from 11%, just a week after the Ontario government increased its Production Services Tax Credit to 18% from 11%.
The nine-point increase for foreign productions, announced by Quebec Finance Minister Yves Séguin on Dec. 30, boosts the province’s tax credit two percentage points higher than Ontario’s.

This month, three new comedy pilots featuring some of the top names in Canadian comedy, including Colin Mochrie, Mary Walsh and Peter Keleghan, will premier on CBC. And rather than relying solely on ratings and sample audiences to evaluate the pilots’ potential, the pubcaster is going straight to the source – the viewers.