Vancouver: Forty individual program titles were honored with 80 Leo Awards May 28 and 29 in Vancouver, with The Big Charade winning nine, including best short film (Carwyn Jones, producer).

The high-definition rollout continues to cover the Canadian map, with CTV launching CTV HD West, a new national HD feed for broadcast through Bell ExpressVu, on June 1. The station offers the same programming lineup as Vancouver’s CTV British Columbia, presenting true HD content when available, with analog shows digitally ‘upconverted.’

* Former CFTPA boss Elizabeth McDonald has resurfaced at Telefilm Canada, and is setting up a new ‘business intelligence unit’ under the funder’s international operations and development division.

Global has put a new face on its late-night programming, and it’s the smiling mug of Jebb Fink, a comic and TV host newly hired away from the morning show on Calgary’s A-Channel to host Global Late Night, a show-in-the-testing set to air in June.

Holly Agnew is an associate in the Toronto law firm of McMillan Binch LLP and a member of the firm’s KNOWlaw Group. This article was prepared with the assistance of Ed Tenki, student-at-law.

In the story ’15/Love overcomes tragedy’ in the May 24 issue, Playback mistakenly wrote that two characters were written out of the series in a car accident. In fact, the tragedy is acknowledged through a brief reference to a plane crash in which there were no survivors.

Perhaps it was the feds’ restoration of their CTF contribution. Whatever the case, most in the industry feel optimistic. In response to a recent online Playback poll asking ‘Will film and television production volumes increase in 2004 compared to 2003?’, 54% of respondents voted Yes, while 46% voted no.

At the risk of being accused of being Toronto-centric, I’d like somebody to explain to me the value of having seven production centers in Canada.

As recently as a couple of months ago, Alex Olegnowicz, president of Toronto’s Imarion Post Production, noted pessimism among his clients, not to mention several shows not going forward. ‘The market is way tighter,’ he told Playback then, citing the impact of the drop in the federal government’s annual Canadian Television Fund allotment. But now, with the feds having restored their contribution to $100 million a year for the next two years, a dark cloud has lifted.

Calibre Digital Pictures has an ‘Evel’ production in its midst, as in Evil Knievel, a Turner Network Television MOW about the 1970s car-jumping daredevil extraordinaire. The Toronto animation and FX shop is in production on the movie based on the life of Knievel, who launched his motorcycle stunt career in 1965, drawing ever-bigger crowds for his (barely) death-defying feats.

Toronto: The same mix of Maya and proprietary software that gave life to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings will next be used to animate a much less sinister character, the spunky 13-year-old girl at the front of Nelvana’s Jane and the Dragon. The 26 x 30 series is a coproduction with Weta Workshop, the suddenly famous New Zealand outfit that did the CG for all those orcs, trolls and otherworldly what-not in the Peter Jackson trilogy, scoring an Oscar and BAFTA earlier this year. Jackson is part owner of the company.

A night at the opera