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Correction
The July 24 news item ‘Boros gets boost’ misspelled the name of filmmaker Philip Borsos and the award given in his honor at the Whistler Film Festival.
CTV: don’t hate me because I’m successful
In its controversial $1.4-billion bid to acquire CHUM Ltd., Bell Globemedia/CTV says it just wants what chief competitor CanWest Global already has.
Be Real asks ‘Who are you? Where are you going?’
Producer Tim Alp didn’t want to spend a lot of money on his next show, so he came up with Be Real.
Trudeau in WWI drama
Montreal – Filmmaker Brian McKenna (Big Sugar) is hoping that nostalgia will win over audiences for his ambitious CBC miniseries, The Great War.
Therriault, Girard, McKellar sign on for Boy
Saskatchewan – Some top-shelf talent has been tapped for the Minds Eye Entertainment mini-series The Englishman’s Boy, which began shooting on July 31 for CBC.
Muse wraps Spelling thriller
Ottawa – Tori Spelling was back in Ottawa last month, shooting The House Sitter for Muse Entertainment and Sound Venture Productions. The MOW – which follows her 2005 shoot of Mind Over Murder, also from Muse – has the former 90210-er as a struggling artist caught up in a murder mystery.
CW’s Runaway production
Toronto – The cast and crew of Runaway have set up shop at Toronto’s Downsview Park for the six-month shoot of its first season. The 13 x 60 run, for Sony TV and newly formed CW Television Network, follows a family on the run from the law following a wrongful murder conviction and stars Mark Wahlberg.
Yowza crafts dinosaurs
Toronto – The live-action shoot of DinoSapien wraps early this month, but the CG will continue well into next year as Yowza Digital Animation inserts dinosaurs into the 15 x 30 tween adventure series.
Briefly
* Director Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue) will be in Vancouver with the U.S. feature Marriage until late October. The period drama stars Chris Cooper (Adaptation) and Pierce Brosnan.
Toronto production sags, Ontario regions ramp up
Does size matter? Apparently it does when it comes to film and TV production in Ontario.
Toronto, the giant, is seeing the number of Hollywood productions it is servicing shrink in the face of a high Canadian dollar and competition from as far away as Eastern Europe, while the number of smaller homegrown productions rolling in Ontario is up – but they are hitting the highway for Hamilton and Ottawa.
Meet the Commish: Q&A with Karen Thorne-Stone
Four months ago, Karen Thorne-Stone assumed the newly created post of Toronto film commissioner. As the city’s former executive director for economic development, she was no stranger to the production industry’s lead role in the municipal economy, but nonetheless she was charged with some formidable challenges. Chief among them was finding a way to rejuvenate a production center that had been perhaps the hottest spot for offshore Hollywood production at the beginning of the decade, but which had faded considerably due to increased competition from within Canada and around the world.
Toronto’s ‘other studios’ in holding pattern
The face of Toronto’s Port Lands will soon be quite different.
Rowan wraps
Kelly Rowan (The O.C., Eight Days to Live) stars as a Mormon fundamentalist who flees a polygamous community in the CTV MOW In God’s Country. The movie, produced by Shaftesbury Films, wrapped in July after shooting around Ontario in Toronto, Hamilton, Ancaster and Dundas. Desperate Housewives’ Richard Burgi (left) and ReGenesis’ Peter Outerbridge also star.
Industry finally embracing HD
After a slow start out the gate, HD production is picking up steam in Canada.
Hot cameras
There are HD cameras now available to suit most production genres and budgets, and with HD broadcasting ramping up, it’s a format all TV producers will have to embrace sooner rather than later. Some top feature film directors such as George Lucas and Michael Mann have also already done so.
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