You turn on American TV and there seems to be little worth watching. You turn on Canadian TV and there seems to be little worth watching. While the reasons are quite different, the results often have a similar quality: non-compelling and unoriginal programming.

In Playback’s May 27 CBC tribute, Rae Hull was credited as executive producer of ZeD. Hull is, in fact, the executive in charge of production for ZeD, while McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves is ZeD’s exec producer.

Banff, AB: Citing a need for ‘greater fairness, transparency and consistency,’ Telefilm Canada’s executive director Richard Stursberg announced a series of measures at Banff2002 aimed at improving his organization’s decision-making processes and overall performance.

* Music industry executive Richard Camilleri has been appointed CanWest Global Communications’ new chief operating officer responsible for the integration of TV, radio, print, advertising and interactive operations. He is former president of Sony Music Entertainment (Canada) and more recently was chairman and CEO of Arius3D, a 3D imaging company.

CTF shuffles management

Montreal: Apart from some kind of required correlation to the arts, Bravo!FACT is arguably the most wide open of the national production funding programs. The foundation provides grants of up to $25,000 to established directors seeking creative relief as well as to emerging talents looking for a start.

Montreal: Cinemaginaire, one of the country’s most consistently successful feature film production companies, is in various stages of preproduction on new films by Denys Arcand and Emile Gaudreault and its first-ever episodic TV drama.
Producer Denise Robert says Arcand’s Les Invasions barbares is a revisiting, not a sequel, more than two decades later of the lives of Le Declin de l’empire amercain’s (1986) smart, middle-class Quebecois characters, portrayed by Dorothee Berryman, Dominique Michel, Louise Portal, Pierre Curzi, Yves Jacques and Remy Girard. Declin cinematographer Guy Dufaux is shooting Invasions.
The film is the renowned director’s first original script in French since Jesus de Montreal (1989). Arcand cowrote Stardom (2000) and was essentially a director for hire on Joyeux Calvaire (1996) and Love and Human Remains (1993).

True to its strategy of following a year or two of development with a period of intense shooting, Toronto prodco Rhombus Media is underway or soon to embark on a diverse slate of new projects.
An Idea of Canada is the working title for a one-hour doc, produced by Rhombus partner Niv Fichman and Jody Shapiro, that follows Governor General Adrienne Clarkson on regional visits across Canada. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of Canadian citizens being appointed to the governor general post previously occupied by British appointees. The doc focuses on Clarkson’s stops in smaller communities on Canadian coasts, and so far the crew has shot in the Arctic, yielding 30 hours of footage, in St. John’s and along the Labrador coast, and it will soon head off to B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands.

Vancouver: Dare we say it, but the Film and Television Action Committee may be having some negative effect on production volumes in Vancouver this year. The FTAC in Hollywood, which blames Canada for the loss of production and jobs at home, is the likely culprit behind the loss of at least two pilots that shot in Vancouver but are going to be made as series in Los Angeles.
CBS’ Haunted, about a detective who gets help from dead people to solve crimes, and Touchstone/ABC’s That Was Then, about a 30-year-old who travels back in time to get a second chance at his life, have been picked up as series but are in production in L.A. because of apparent pressure from cast and crew to stay put.

In an ambitious six-camera, high-definition shoot with no DOP and unexpected scheduling conflicts, Jack Lenz overcame near-insurmountable obstacles to produce a program commemorating a massive concert for the United Nations’ Special Session on Children.

Canadian animation recently reaffirmed its excellence on the international stage, with two very different kinds of films winning awards at a pair of the world’s premiere festivals, both in France.

F/X shops across Canada are in an expanding mood, which might sound surprising given the uncertainty characterizing the current marketplace. But new shops are popping up while shops that catered to a different kind of clientele are now looking at long form, and some established houses continue to get bigger.

Few animation and F/X providers can afford to keep all their eggs in one basket anymore. Whether their initial focus was on 3D F/X for feature films and TV series, commercial work or service, many shops across Canada have found in the past year’s volatile market that diversification is simply a matter of survival.

It looked like director James Cameron was going to single-handedly kill the physical F/X industry.

Ryan, produced by Toronto’s 49th Parallel, is a project of interest on several levels. The one-hour made-for-TV film is an innovative documentary with live-action footage directed by John L’Ecuyer (Saint Jude) on the subject of Ryan Larkin, an animator prodigy from the National Film Board in the late 1960s.