Vancouver: Proving that fact-based production is still the mainstay of the domestic industry on the West Coast, 21 documentary singles and two long-form documentaries received investment from funding agency British Columbia Film, which has announced its choices for television support for…

Montreal: Radio-Canada’s tiny feature film department has received close to 60 movie screenplays and production proposals since the beginning of the year, a huge volume of work for Suzanne Laverdiere, SRC’s director of independent production, acquisitions and feature films, and Louise…

Banff: Corus Entertainment used this year’s Banff Television Festival to announce the launch of a new production fund that is set to finance close to $8 million in original Canadian productions….

Banff: While this year’s Banff Rockie Awards saw the U.S. and U.K. garner the majority of wins, with four each, the biggest winner was the French documentary La terre des ames errantes (The Land of Wondering Souls), which took home the…

* Philippa King, head of business affairs at Rhombus Media for the past five years, has been made partner at the company, joining Niv Fichman, Daniel Iron, Sheena Macdonald, Larry Weinstein and Barbara Willis Sweete….

The scale of digital special F/X produced by Montreal’s BIG BANG FX/Animation for the new live-action family series The Neverending Story may accurately be described as fantastic, with as many as 250 to 300 F/X shots in the first nine (of 13) episodes alone.
F/X on the show include ‘complete virtual cities ready to be used from any angle – cityscapes in which we can actually land a plane,’ says series F/X producer and BIG BANG president Mario Rachiele.
Rachiele calls F/X such as The Neverending Story’s cityscapes ‘amortized effects, because it takes four months to build, but once it’s built it can be used throughout the series.’

Canadian animators claimed major awards at this year’s International Animated Film Festival in France. The celebrated festival, held in Annecy, a fairy tale town near Geneva, June 4-9, saw big showings for two NFB shorts: Paul Driessen’s The Boy Who Saw…

The volume of sci-fi programming shot in Vancouver has been keeping local post-production and F/X shops such as Rainmaker Digital Pictures buzzing. Sometimes rival shops even end up sharing the load.
‘Different visual effects supervisors work different ways,’ explains Brian Moylan, director of digital imaging at Rainmaker. ‘Some divide [the work] among several shops, and others are adamant that an entire episode gets done at one shop. It’s [dependent on] the amount of effects work you have to get done.’

Go east, young men. …

Patrick Batrynchuk is director of digital media services at Bullet Digital Post, a Toronto shop that specializes in offline & online editorial, compositing and F/X….

Launched in 1993, BIG BANG FX/Animation, an affiliate of MIJO Corporation, has a wide array of technology in its spacious Old Montreal offices. Its compositing environment includes the Discreet Inferno, Flame, Flint, Effect and Combustion systems, Adobe AfterEffects, Softimage|Eddie and Avid…

Watching Elvis and Richard Nixon do a duet on My Way at the White House is not an experience enjoyed by many people, but Lisa Shamata counts it as one of the fringe benefits of her job.
For the unit publicist – in the above case working on the movie Elvis Meets Nixon for Dufferin Gate – the energy of being on set is one of the best parts of the job. Shamata has a preference for unit publicity and puts heavy emphasis on being part of the on-set team rather than an outsider whose needs disrupt filming.