Duraid Munajim is a Toronto-based director of photography who has shot music videos, short films and documentaries. In this article, he discusses his experience with the Sony 24p format on the documentary Acrobats & Maniacs, about Quebec-based Cirque Eos, acrobats who incorporate choreography, music and special effects.

High-end TV series no doubt represent a sort of Holy Grail for many Canadian post-production shops. But the reality is that many facilities, except for the very largest and even some of those, take on whatever projects they have to, including corporate videos and infomercials, to keep busy. This is especially true with an increasingly fragmented broadcasting industry and shrinking licence fees for high-budget production.

The Fast Runner – Atanarjuat walked away from this year’s Genies with the achievement in editing award among its half dozen statuettes. What makes that particularly impressive is not only that the Igloolik Isuma/National Film Board coproduction is the first-ever Inuit feature and shot on video, but also that the cutting credits include two of the film’s coproducers, director Zacharias Kunuk and cinematographer Norman Cohn.

With eight new sports-based digital channels joining an already growing number of sports specialties, broadcast design studios report that sports nets have become the biggest consumers of 3D animated promos, station IDs, intros and bumpers. And although industry trends adhere to a pendulum-like pattern, one thing always remains: the challenge to imprint brands on viewers’ brains.

With an influx of more than 40 diginets vying for eyeballs and branding the name of the game, broadcast design firms and in-house design departments are pulling out the stops to create distinctive and memorable graphics reflecting their respective channels’ programming philosophies.

Doug Morris is executive producer and partner at Soho, a Toronto-based studio that provides CG animation, type design and digital FX for broadcast design and commercial clients.

Plans for a new studio facility proposed for the port lands in downtown Toronto include what could end up being the world’s largest custom-built soundstage.
Earlier this month, Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman announced the creation of a massive $150-million studio development on the waterfront with the core intent of attracting big-budget (US$50 million-plus) features that have been bypassing the city.
According to the city, the new production centre will generate an extra US$250 million a year in film production.

Fears for the future of the Canadian production industry, reduced economic growth, the post 9/11 climate and international trade issues, particularly with the U.S., were the most obvious themes at this year’s Prime Time in Ottawa, the annual CFTPA conference held Feb. 6-8.
With roughly 550 attendees, a large portion of whom had association acronyms next to their names, there was standing room only at the conference’s three most pivotal sessions: the State of the Canadian Industry Report, in which Pat Ferns, president and CEO of the Banff Television Foundation, and National Film Board chairman Jacques Bensimon presented the findings of the CFTPA’s Profile 2002; the Pundits Panel entitled Future Shocks: What Lies Ahead for the Canadian Production Industry; and the Jack Valenti Luncheon, at which the president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America spoke passionately and poetically of the synergies between Canada and the U.S., while in the same breath denounced governments that ‘put up barricades to exile or restrict TV programs and films which may compete with local creativity.’

Montreal: Richard Stursberg, Telefilm Canada’s new executive director, says the industry has ‘a lot of work to do’ to build box-office performance for Canadian films, notably on the English side where market share dipped to under 0.5% last year. With little in the way of performance indicators – new films produced in the first year of the Canada Feature Film Fund have yet to be released – the newly released CFFF guidelines for 2002/03 hold the line on reserved production and development financing for producers at 50%. Stursberg, however, gives strong indications the fund’s performance component will move to 60% in 2003/04.

As anticipated, the night of the 22nd annual Genie Awards belonged to Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the Igloolik Isuma Productions/National Film Board Inuit drama shot on digital video. Those criteria would otherwise make the film’s capture of six Genies a major upset, but the movie had already won awards at Toronto, Cannes, Edinburgh and Flanders. At the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Feb. 7, it added to its hardware case the Genies for best motion picture, direction, screenplay, editing, score and the Claude Jutra Award for best first director.

Cambium, Catalyst merge

In the ministerial fashion, and on the street, it seems all the talk is about low productivity in the land. At the CFTPA Prime Time conference in Ottawa, industry movers and shakers worried about the production outlook, retrenchment in the TV advertising market and threatening trade issues. That makes sense. Competent, honest leaders in business and politics are paid to worry, isolate problems and solve them.