St. John’s, NF-based Anita McGee’s The Bread Maker has the distinction of being the only East Coast feature film to make it into the Perspective Canada program at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The Bread Maker is producer/director McGee’s first feature, which makes the selection even sweeter.

Montreal: VFX house Meteor Studios is producing 1,500 HD shots of the terrifying monsters that ruled the Earth tens of millions of years ago in the new four-hour doc series Dinosaur Planet.
The show is a round-the-world dramatic recreation of life in the time of the dinosaurs, with one of the main attractions being the creation of 25 new creatures never before revealed in primetime 3D animation.

‘You never know, but it was a happy surprise,’ says Montreal director of photography Allen Smith of the huge box office for the Max Films comedy La Grande Seduction. The Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm-distributed feature, produced by Roger Frappier and Luc Vandal, generated more than $3.5 million on 76 Quebec screens in its first 17 days of release.

Broadcast rental house Sim Video Productions has relocated its Toronto office to a facility it says is more than three times larger than its previous digs.

Although she has yet to choose her destination, one thing is certain: when Elizabeth McDonald steps down as president and CEO of the Canadian Film and Television Production Association later this month, it will be only the beginning of a new chapter in the librarian-turned-lobbyist’s diverse career.

Late ’70s/early ’80s: McDonald graduates from Montreal’s McGill University with a master’s degree in library sciences

A good friend and a good foe

On intellectual property rights:

Canada’s private funds are a major resource for producers as they try to navigate the complex rules of the national funding game. The funds are flexible and substantial enough to be able to trigger production on a range of priority programs – other than big-budget drama series – independent of support from the Canadian Television Fund. There are 20 or more funds, in large measure ‘children of the CRTC,’ that collectively contribute between $40 million and $50 million annually to the industry.

The Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund has announced a revised mandate that will further facilitate the long-term partnering between the broadcast and Web sectors and increase the national and global profile of industry stakeholders.

Can a handful of industry heavies undo the damage brought on by the rising loonie, funding cuts and a shifting market? That is the question that will, eventually, be answered by the Ontario Film and Television Consortium, a collection of high-ranked industry pros who last month unveiled their plans to revive foreign and domestic production in Ontario.
The OFTC brings together more than 30 companies, unions and guilds representing studios, post houses and some 25,000 actors, directors and technicians, all of whom have been bruised by the three-year province-wide drop in production and, more recently, the SARS crisis.

Montreal: If it’s business as usual this summer for movie producer Don Carmody, then he’s in some Canadian city overseeing the production of a major motion picture. A big part of his job is reassuring other production executives, who are generally quite far away, that all is well, while keeping huge daily expenditures on track, and, occasionally, reading the riot act to cast and crew.