At the fore-Front of Craig’s nets

When Quebec director Lea Pool faced post-production on The Blue Butterfly, her biggest production to date, she turned to Michel Arcand, the editor on most of her previous features, to cut the piece.

Top picture editors are more than great cutters. They’re storytellers with an artful eye who know how to bring characters to life on the screen. They work long hours behind the scenes with tight deadlines, but last year’s Gemini award-winning editors love every minute of it.

For years, Massachusetts-based Avid Technology’s post-production solutions have been the industry standard-bearer. The list of this year’s Academy Award nominees only reinforces Avid’s standing, showing widespread usage of its nonlinear film and video editing systems, as well as the Pro Tools audio production system of subsidiary Digidesign and the 3D animation and FX software from its Softimage division.

The American Cinema Editors organization gave out its annual Eddie Awards in Los Angeles on Feb. 15, and a student from Sheridan College out of Oakville, ON was among the winners.

About this time last year, director Avi Lewis and crew were en route to Argentina to shoot a doc about poverty issues, and stumbled upon the perfect story when unemployed factory workers took over and reopened their old mill, running it as a co-op. The democratic, take-back-the-economy movement became their centerpiece and the project known as Fire the Experts – now in post for the Ontario arm of the National Film Board and Barna-Alper Productions – became The Take.

Cineflix makes Zero Hour deal

Vancouver: Making it big for a Vancouver producer might be a stint on Oprah’s Oxygen Network, a feat Force Four Productions will achieve March 12 when the one-hour pilot of Making it Big airs.
The documentary series with reality elements, which also airs on Life Network in Canada April 24, is about three up and comers who vie for an opportunity of a lifetime.

The history of ACTRA is the story of Canada’s broadcast industry, from the early 1940s, when CBC Radio dramas such as Jake and the Kid represented the sum total of Canadian drama, to the 1,000-channel universe of the present.

Sandy Mackay-Smith is president of London-based Invicta Capital’s Canadian branch, which provides U.K./Canada leaseback funding to Canadian dramatic film producers. Recent features on which it has participated include Head in the Clouds starring Charlize Theron, A Different Loyalty with Sharon Stone and Sienna Films’ Touch of Pink.

In addition to proclaiming a permanent downturn in domestic and international demand for drama, Alliance Atlantis Communications’ December decision to get out of production sent a bold message to the industry that producing in Canada under the current system is no longer viable from a business standpoint, a sentiment with which at least some independent producers are forced to agree.

Ottawa: Funding concerns always dominate the conversation when producers get together, but anxieties reached a fever pitch at Prime Time in Ottawa 2004, the annual powwow of the CFTPA and APFTQ, Jan. 28-30.