Genome – the musical

Meet the beetles

Daniel Pellerin is a Genie and Gemini Award-winning sound supervisor, rerecording mixer, music supervisor and contractor. Recent credits for Daniel Pellerin Digital Sound Productions include the dramatic features Being Julia and The Dark Hour; the TV series Puppets Who Kill; docs The Take, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire, Shipbreakers, A Whale of a Tale and ScaredSacred; and the animated film Yankee Irving, started by the late Christopher Reeve.

Montreal: As with other film production centers across Canada, Quebec has been feeling the pinch in the reversal of fortune of guest productions. This year has seen a substantial decline in foreign shoots coming to la belle province.

Anglophone producers in Quebec have joined forces to create the English Language Film and Television Council of Quebec. In addition to identifying common challenges Quebec’s English producers face, one of the council’s key objectives will be to gain recognition for them as an official language minority community, making them eligible for federal funding that is usually reserved for francophones living outside Quebec.

Quebec actor Emmanuel Bilodeau confesses to being occasionally confused on the set of Rene Levesque, the six-hour miniseries about the late separatist leader currently shooting in Montreal. The CBC/SRC mini is being shot in French and English concurrently, meaning the actor, who plays Levesque, is required to switch linguistic gears at very short notice.

Pundits looked upon last year as an aberration in the Quebec feature film business, with an inordinate amount of domestic releases achieving blockbuster status at the local box office. Leading the pack were Seraphin: un homme et son peche (the unprecedented success of which carried over from 2002), La Grande seduction, Les Invasions barbares and Mambo Italiano, each taking in more than $5 million.

A thousand people are heading to Ottawa this month to make themselves heard.

For many it was sad but not surprising. Global Television was, after all, entering a second season of losing and losing badly to CTV, trailing in both ad sales and in ratings. The net usually has only five or six of the top-20 shows in any given week. Global bought all of the wrong U.S. series for its ’03/04 season – Coupling, The Lyon’s Den, Skin, et al – and lost two of its biggest titles, Friends and Frasier, when their runs ended in May. The summer season produced no solid hits – does anyone even remember The Men’s Room or The Jury? – and despite the moderate success of the spin-off Joey, warhorses such as The Simpsons and Survivor, and the returning The Apprentice and Without a Trace, the net’s ’04/05 schedule is off to another slow start, leaning more heavily than ever on its aging lineup of sitcoms, short-run giggle reality, and its low-budget, homemade Train 48. Someone would have to take the blame.

When the Canadian Association of Broadcasters hands out its annual Gold Ribbon Awards on Nov. 30, the top honor will go to Corus Entertainment president and CEO John Cassaday, who takes this year’s Gold Ribbon Award for Broadcast Excellence.

If the buzz out of MIPCOM is any indication, the long-hyped potential of wireless for the broadcasting community is fast becoming reality. And broadcaster CHUM, in collaboration with QuickPlay Media and Rogers Wireless, is at the vanguard.

Unlike VisionTV, which is multi-faith, digital channel, Salt + Light Television provides a Catholic-specific take on entertainment, news and information. Its challenge, following a recent staff expansion and move to a larger facility in downtown Toronto, is to establish itself as more than a purveyor of fire and brimstone. Launched last December, the station’s demographic has skewed older, but it is going after younger eyeballs. In fact, 80% of its staff is aged 20 to 35.

It’s a good year for James Davis and his Toronto commercial production company Reginald Pike.

The Reginald Pike directing team of Ian Letts and Michael Gelfand, better known to those in the advertising biz as The Perlorian Bros., has won this year’s Saatchi & Saatchi First Cut Award for breakout Canadian commercial directors. Their irreverent work has put them on the ad map as a major new force, with spots for clients including Saturn, Bootlegger, Aspirin and Timex.

Last December, six weeks after having an initial conversation with untitled and Reginald Pike executive producer James Davis about a career shift, Vancouver-based commercial photographer (and this year’s First Cut runner-up) Mark Gilbert found himself in a Toronto morgue shooting his first television commercial. It was a PSA for WISH (the Women’s Information Safe House) – a refuge for prostitutes and street people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – via agency Rethink.