Shots & Chasers tracks who shot what during the previous month. Production companies are invited to fax information for this column as frequently as possible to Dave Lazar or Dustin Dinoff at (416) 408-0870. The next deadline for submissions is Wednesday, September 19.

After eight years at the helm of Astral Television, president and CEO Lisa de Wilde announced last month that she’s moving on.
Short on details about her future, de Wilde will leave the company on Sept. 14, at which time she is likely to announce her next move.
With three top industry jobs in the waiting, there’s no telling where the Winnipeg-born lawyer-turned-broadcast executive will land.

* Claude Galipeau, former VP, new media at Salter Street Films, has joined Alliance Atlantis Broadcasting as VP, broadcasting.

Developing a strong commercial roster in Canada is no easy task. Maintaining a delicate balance between the best interests of a production company’s local talent and the international directors they represent, prodco execs, producers and sales reps are faced with hard decisions every time a board comes over the fax machine.
Do you offer the job to a well-established director a young creative team would stand on their heads for, or to an up-and-comer who would benefit greatly from the job, but who the creative team would likely refuse?

In the current commercial slowdown, many of the directors who continue to work steadily gratefully attribute their success to their reputations for excelling at particular genres or product types. This stands in sharp contrast to higher times when helmers did all they could to resist being pigeonholed.
Many of the directors holding on to that resistance are sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, while those busy on the set say this type of categorization is the only thing keeping them working.

Director/writer: Catherine Martin * Producer/editor: Lorraine Dufour * Cinematographer: Jean-Claude Labrecque * Sound: Marcel Chouinard * Music: Robert M. Lepage * Diary by: Susan Tolusso

Saskatchewan – it’s home to the Green Riders, the mystic prairie and Bill Stampe, commercial director and owner of Cinepost Films. What are the challenges that face a commercial director working in Saskatoon, outside Canada’s major markets? The veteran spot director shares his insights.

With the increasingly powerful state of computer hardware and the many new software features designed to take advantage of that power, the main themes at SIGGRAPH 2001 in Los Angeles included service, support and work-flow streamlining.
At the five-day conference, held in August at the L.A. Convention Centre, software manufacturers imparted ways to make producers’ lives easier and more efficient, while students and producers marveled at the new systems, taking tutorials on-the-spot and attempting to apply the new capabilities to their work-flow challenges.

* Director: Anne Wheeler * Writer: Elyse Friedman * Producer: Gavin Wilding * Cinematographer: David Frazee * Diary by: Kathy Barthel

Zach Math has an equation for you. Take three parts training, one part experience and multiply by confidence and humility, plus one. The results are not in the back of a textbook. They’re listed on the commercial reel of a young Canadian director making waves less than a year into his career in the spot business.

The list of directors at Montreal production house Jet Films reveals helmers with first names including Sylvain, Louis-Pascal and Guillaume. Nestled amidst all this testosterone is Mireille Veillet, the shop’s lone female director. Do industry folk perceive her any differently in this business that is so top-heavy with men?

* Director/writer/cinematographer: Paul Cowan * Producer: Keith Martin * Diary by: Etan Vlessing