Vancouver: The future is brightening for B.C. television series production and it’s coming from the past. Producers Kirk Shaw and James Shavick begin production Nov. 8 on Young Blades, described as a next generation of Musketeers set in 17th century Paris.
The 22 hours will air on CHUM in Canada and PAX TV in the U.S. Sony owns the foreign rights to the six-out-of-10 show.

Busy new seasons

Nanaimo subs as Sam’s Lake

St. John’s, NF: Pope Productions is gearing up for two interprovincial coproductions with Toronto-based Shaftesbury Films – a comedy series for Family Channel and a miniseries for CBC – in addition to several other projects due to air in the new year.
Life With Derek, a 13 x 30 comedy series, started shooting Oct. 18 in Corner Brook, NF, with plans to wrap Dec. 1.

Silverwing flies as feature trilogy

It Waits for Cannell in Van

This essay, entitled ‘Cultural Ventriloquism,’ is an edited excerpt from Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, an anthology of essays, photos and other items edited by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour and designed by Egoyan and Gilbert Li. The 548-page book – both ‘intriguing’ and ‘chock-a-block with interesting ideas,’ according to The Globe and Mail – is in stores now, via Toronto’s Alphabet City Media and copublisher The MIT Press. Henri Behar is a writer, radio and TV producer, and a subtitler of movies.

In the Oct. 11 page one story ‘Lantos, Barna in bed on sexy comedy G-Spot,’ Robert Lantos was incorrectly credited as producer of the series Traders. Traders was in fact initially a production of Atlantis Communications, while Lantos was CEO of Alliance Communications. The program subsequently became a production of the newly merged Alliance Atlantis Communications, which also marked Lantos’ departure to form Serendipity Point Films.

A new study commissioned by the CFTPA, DGC, ACTRA Toronto and FilmOntario among others on the real effects of so-called runaway production is long overdue.

Toronto post house Magnetic North’s acquisition of rival shop Casablanca is five months old, and the newly formed entity is busily looking to reap the rewards of that consolidation.

With all the takeovers, mergers, bankruptcies and reorgs that have marked the Canadian post-production scene of late, few developments come as a surprise. One exception might be the news that Andy Sykes, VP sales and marketing at Toronto’s Toybox, had jumped ship to main rival Deluxe. The fact that Sykes was a cofounder and VP of Toybox parent company Command Post & Transfer, which Technicolor recently purchased, makes the move especially unexpected.

Technicolor Entertainment Services has announced its plans to rebrand its recent pickup Command Post & Transfer as Technicolor. The global post giant, a division of French conglomerate Thomson, completed its acquisition of the struggling Canuck post major this summer.

Box-office-topping sci-fi actioner Resident Evil: Apocalypse, an 80/20 Canada/U.K. copro, not only shot in Toronto, but also gave several Canuck shops the chance to show their stuff on the film’s extensive FX. The likes of Mr. X, C.O.R.E Digital Pictures and Frantic Films contributed towards Canada’s 60% FX quota on the Resident Evil sequel, which has heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich) on the run from the evil Umbrella Corp.’s Nemesis creation in Raccoon City, a town of zombies.

Fred Brennan has worked in every aspect of sound editing over 28 years in Toronto. As a supervising editor, he specializes in dialogue and ADR editing. He has won Genies for his contributions to Sunshine, Love Come Down and Max, and he recently was supervising dialogue editor on Being Julia.

The stock footage industry is hot and getting hotter. Just ask Anita Turcotte, visual researcher for Toronto’s high-end doc prodco Cream Productions, where she is responsible for finding the archive elements that make up 30% of footage in the productions she works on. She starts by breaking down the script into archival elements, then begins the needle-in-a-haystack search for the perfect clips among a growing volume of high-quality stock footage.