Alliance Atlantis Communications

On Telefilm’s 5% box office goal…

This was the year digital technology lived up to its hype – boosting efficiency and driving down costs at picture and sound post-production companies across Canada. The pros report that going digital has finally made life, and business, significantly easier.

Comeback of the year

Production in Calgary is booming. On top of the latest feature from waydowntown director Gary Burns, shooting has begun on Alberta’s biggest local feature yet, which has some serious star power to boot.
The Great Goose Caper is a family feature from Calgary-based Voice Pictures, budgeted at $8.5 million. Voice’s Wendy Hill-Tout produces with Montreal’s Colin Neale and U.K. coproducer Alex Brown of Studio Eight Productions.
‘The wonderful thing about a budget this size is that you can make creative choices that really add value to the film,’ says Hill-Tout, who adds that one of the distinguishing elements of this production is that scheduling was star-driven rather than budget-driven.

Barbara Willis-Sweete, who drew applause from festival audiences earlier this fall with Perfect Pie, is bringing Timothy Findley’s hit play Elizabeth Rex to the little screen for CBC and Rhombus Media. The historical drama, wherein Elizabeth I pays a visit to William Shakespeare’s theatre troupe, enjoyed a successful run at Ontario’s Stratford Festival a few years back and has been reworked as a two-hour TV special by Rhombus partner Willis-Sweete, who also directs, and Kate Miller. The planned five-week shoot is expected to wrap early next month.
‘It’s similar to what we did a few years ago with Long Day’s Journey into Night,’ says Rhombus’ Niv Fichman of the $2-million project, which is backed by Telefilm Canada, Bravo! and CBC. Fichman produces along with Danny Iron and Jennifer Jonas.

Vancouver: The West Coast’s enterprising guerilla filmmakers are back at their resourceful best with the production of Lucky Stars (aka Pick of the Litter), the first feature for producers Jump Communications and Like Minded Media.
Written by the producer/director team of Maureen Prentice and Jason Margolis, Lucky Stars is a digital video romantic comedy about a publicist who, after being dumped by her lover, gets a dog and tries to get him into the movie business.
The $100,000 feature stars Josephine Jacob (Madchen Madchen), Brendan Fletcher (The Law of Enlosures), Sara Walker (Housekeeping), Elisabeth Rosen (Murder in a Small Town), Damon Johnson (The Last Stop), Stanley Katz (MVP), Ray Galletti (I Spy), Mackenzie Gray (The Net), Peter Chinkoda (MTV Real World: The Lost Years), Michael Scholar Jr. (Street Cents), Prentice and her canine Lucky.

Montreal: About a year after its launch, Spectra Animation and veteran producer Andre A. Belanger have started production on Kid Paddle, a 52 x 11 animation series coproduction with Leon Perrahia (Largo Winch) of France’s Dupuis Audiovisuel. The show is based on a popular Euro comic book series and Belanger says negotiations carried on ‘over four long months.’ Belanger and Spectra VP, television Luc Chatelain are exec producers.
Kid Paddle targets the eight- to 12-year-old crowd and follows the highly interactive adventures of Kid Paddle, Big Bang and Horace, who seem to interact and coalesce with anything that’s fun, especially videogames and spooky movies.
Spectra is putting up 26% of the $2.5 million in financing and will create many of the show’s script and storyboard elements and much of the background coloring.

From the time CanWest created globaltv.com and established an interactive media division in 1999, the company decided the Internet would be a tool to assist advertisers and deliver information and entertainment to consumers, but not a business on its own. Leonard Asper, who was named CEO that year, says the company’s media ‘are totally synergistic. The cross-promotion aspects…the main thrust of what we’re doing. We want to build ratings and opportunities.’

Toronto-based director of photography Douglas Koch (Last Night, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) didn’t need much convincing when director Deepa Mehta approached him to lens her musical romantic comedy Bollywood/Hollywood.

Can a project win awards for best writing, direction and actor despite not even being nominated for best TV movie or dramatic miniseries? The answer to the riddle is yes, as demonstrated at the 17th Annual Gemini Awards by Trudeau, the two-part mini chronicling the public and private lives of Canada’s most flamboyant prime minister. The trophy recipients were confused by the inconsistency.
‘It’s bizarre and endemic to award shows,’ Wayne Grigsby said backstage after getting the nod for best writing for Trudeau. The former Montreal journalist currently heads Nova Scotia’s Big Motion Pictures, producer of the mini, which drew two million viewers. He added that CBC and Radio-Canada have asked him to produce a prequel to Trudeau showing PET’s early years before he entered the political stage.
Trudeau director Jerry Ciccoritti picked up his seventh Gemini Award. When asked what he thought of Trudeau’s snub in the TV movie or miniseries category, he offered a polite ‘No comment.’

Depending on who you ask, people like Greg Neely and Laurence Roberts are either rewriting the rules of feature film development or they have wasted a great deal of time and money making a sci-fi action short.
Both men dream of making a lavish sci-fi picture called Torchbearer, and have for several years been working on a story, concept sketches, costume designs and other details. They shopped a script around – at Echo Lake Productions, HBO, the Independent Film Channel – but, having only one previous film credit between them, went nowhere.
‘We were having a heck of a time getting people interested without something to show,’ says Roberts, the director and writer whose documentary Amidst Us played the festival circuit in 1996. ‘That’s where Prelude was born, out of the need to have a portfolio piece.’
Prelude: The Calm Before the Storm is the short film Roberts and producer Neely made, with their own money, to pitch Torchbearer.