Jeff August, creative director of Calgary’s White Iron Digital, says although only 20% of his shop’s body of work is commercial production, it certainly makes an impact when a board comes through.
August recently brought home an Emmy Award for outstanding editing on an ESPN spot about the Heisman Trophy. He was nominated in the sports category, competing against himself for his work on ESPN’s 2000 Summer X Games.

Looking to fill a market niche with new digital technologies not readily available at traditional commercial post houses, torontostartv.com, a two-year-old spin-off of infomercial network Toronto Star TV is hoping to capture some of Canada’s post-production business.
torontostartv.com.com is offering digital encoding, Net broadcasts and live webcasting, an ORAD Cyberset ‘O’ system along with digital production and post-production services.
‘We’d definitely like to chew off a bigger piece of the commercial industry,’ says Heather Brunt, torontostartv.com.com‘s operations manager. ‘Given the fact we’re a commercial channel, that was our natural in.’

Montreal: Coproduction with Canada’s two leading European partners, France and the U.K., remains at high levels into 2001, but the industry has to move quickly to deal with big problems with the U.K. and Germany.

Montreal: Telefilm Canada is joining forces with 10 national and provincial organizations, including most of the provincial funding agencies, the CFTPA and the federal government, to launch the Canada banner pavilion at MIPCOM. The new Canada stand is now the second largest at the market after Paramount.

To give his cast and crew an overview of Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story, director Michel Poulette condensed the 300-page script into 30 pages. ‘It’s a very complex story of a contemporary man remembering his past. It starts with the beginning of the century and ends in the sixties. Ten pages were a paragraph,’ he says. ‘We felt the impact over the next few days. In just an hour, everybody had an overview of the story.’

Peter Suschitzky’s list of credits is as varied as it is impressive. The Warsaw-born, London-based director of photography’s features include The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Empire Strikes Back, Mars Attacks! and The Man in the Iron Mask. If there is one continuous thread in the last 13 years of his career, it is his collaboration with director David Cronenberg, which has garnered him Genie Awards for Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash (1996). M. Butterfly (1993), eXistenZ (1999) and the forthcoming Spider round out the films on which the two have worked.

Helen Shaver may be better known as an actor than a director, but it is her directing talent that’s being lauded this year with a Gemini nod for an episode (‘Simon Says’) of The Outer Limits.

Brent-Karl Clackson, nominated for a best director Gemini for The Outer Limits (‘Something About Harry’) has been called ‘the hardest working man in television’ by some of his associates. When he’s not on set, he is known to take his down time by virtually disappearing, and certainly disappearing from the media’s view.

The wisdom of the real-estate mantra location, location, location was proven for Montreal’s Bureau de Post Productions when a strategic move into a desirable, agency-laden neighborhood helped put the shop on the spot post map.

‘We knew from the beginning he [lead character Dominic Da Vinci] would have a drinking problem and we weren’t going to just solve it,’ says Alan Di Fiore, one of the writers on coroner series Da Vinci’s Inquest. ‘He has to deal with that just the way in real life you would not solve someone’s drinking problem in one hour.’

Frank Borg could be an intriguing character on the very show he writes for, Da Vinci’s Inquest. You may, in fact, have spotted him in small roles, such as showcasing his blackjack skills in a season two episode.

The transition from poetry to television writing is not quite as big a leap as some, including poet and Gemini writer nominee Esta Spalding, might think.