The Atlantic Film Festival, this year running Sept. 14-22 in Halifax, has confirmed that Canada, Spain and Latin America will be the focus of its Strategic Partners conference. …

Montreal: International movie star Jackie Chan is the recipient of this year’s World Film Festival Special Grand Prix of the Americas award. …

Montreal: Production on the Muse Entertainment drama series University, filming on location in Montreal, has been suspended. Four of 13 episodes had been completed when Muse announced last week U.S. broadcaster Hallmark Network (formerly Odyssey) had pulled out of the project….

Vancouver: Mainframe Entertainment of Vancouver recorded earnings of $2.4 million ($0.14 per share) on revenue of $39.9 million, making fiscal 2001 (ended March 31) its best year yet. Fiscal 2000, by comparison, reported earnings of $840,000 ($0.05 per share) on revenue…

Alliance Atlantis has reached an agreement with Discovery Networks International to partner on its soon-to-be-launched Category 1 digi-channel Health Network Canada….

The Global Television Network has established a new $6-million Promotion of Programming Fund, aimed at increasing audience awareness of Canadian television….

Alliane Atlantis and BBC have clinched the beginning of their ongoing production relationship with the official Canada/U.K. coproduction of Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom, shooting in Toronto June 23 to Nov. 22.
A 26-part, half-hour series that combines live action with CGI, Ace follows the adventures of a 13-year-old boy whose house is struck by lightning while he’s playing his favorite video game, Ace Lightning. Just then the characters in the game are brought to life and the intermingling of live action and CGI characters begins.
Jim Corston (Longhouse Tales) is producing the series, with BBC’s Rick Siggelkow exec producing.

Montreal: The Jean Claude Lord holiday fantasy film Station Nord opens as a young postman loses his way in a forest on a dark, snowy evening. Saved by an elf, he’s taken to Pere Noel’s secret village and spends many years managing the ‘magic workshop’s’ mailroom until one fateful day he receives a letter from a desperate little girl asking for help.
‘This is the first time in Quebec cinema [history] that we have a Quebecois Santa Claus,’ notes producer Pierre Gendron of Bloom Films.
The $4.3-million movie is a coproduction between Bloom and Z Productions producers Paul Allard and Daniel Morin. Morin and Denyse Benoit wrote the screenplay in association with director Lord (Diva, Lobby).

Vancouver: With the American actors reaching a contract settlement and the threat of production-squelching picket lines relegated to an excuse to take some summer holidays, Vancouver crews are starting to get booked up again.
Production volumes for the rest of the year are not expected to reach the overheated rates of activity leading to July 1 when the actors’ old contract lapsed. But Vancouver, true to its roots as a television town, will be busy with a slew of new and old series. A healthy batch of 18 series is in various forms of prep and production for summer shoots.

Halifax’s Ocean Entertainment is cooking up two new series for Food Network Canada/Food Network (U.S.).
The Food Hunter (13 x 30) follows the international exploits of green grocer and CBC regular Pete Luckett as he travels the globe in search of what producer Johanna Eliot refers to as ‘exotic produce.’
‘The premise of each show is that we are going to places around the world in search of interesting fruits and vegetables and [Luckett] is our explorer,’ says Eliot. ‘Our first episode will be shooting breadfruit in Jamaica at the end of the month. He’ll be searching for the roots of breadfruit – the history of it, where it came from, how it’s distributed, what does the tree or bush look like. Also, there is going to be tons of other food information [in each episode].’

Digital, digital, digital.
In recent months there has been a migration in the production industry, especially in TV, from 16mm and 35mm motion picture stocks to digital video formats from DVCPRO to 24P. Many believe that digital imaging’s improving quality and the economics of shooting threaten to make the photochemical process obsolete. And yet Pro8mm by Super8Sound, a company headquartered in Burbank, CA, has built its entire business on the lowest end of motion picture formats – Super 8 and a professional version of it called Pro8mm.

In the production industry, one needn’t wait long for a new, cooler and better piece of film gear to hit the streets and make its older incarnations seem antiquated. Lately, the biz has been buzzing over prognoses of digital video formats killing anything with a ‘mm’ suffix, but Gerd Kurz, president of Toronto camera shop Precision Camera Inc. Canada, begs to differ.
‘I think there is no threat to 35mm,’ says Kurz. ‘That image format contains far more information. As of now, digital can’t handle that much information. But if I was manufacturing 16mm or Super 16, I’d be scared.’