The hit CBC series The Newsroom brought Toronto director of photography Joan Hutton one of her biggest successes, including a Gemini Award. So it was a no-brainer when show writer/director/actor Ken Finkleman asked her if she wanted to return to lens the long-awaited follow-up, Newsroom: The Movie, a two-hour TV movie picking up where the sardonic dramedy left off.

The following is a list of winners at the 2002 Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards. The nominees were feted recently at a celebration in Toronto.

The atmosphere has changed at the CBC. The hallways still have that alienated Kafkaesque look to them, but if you walk into the edit suites and some of the offices, there is a renewed confidence and excitement in the air.

Spy Films

It’s been five years since Ken Finkleman’s series The Newsroom stormed onto CBC airwaves. Those pining for the cynical satire will be ecstatic to learn that Newsroom: The Movie is currently in production at CBC studios in Toronto.
The two-hour MOW, which offers more nasty goings-on behind the scenes in a TV newsroom, reunites many characters from the series, including Finkleman as neurotic news director George Findlay and Jeremy Hotz and Karen Hines as news producers. Leah Pinsent’s reporter/anchor character from Finkleman’s More Tears series crosses over, and new cast members include Christian Potenza, Reagan Pasternak and John Neville.

In its search for distinctiveness, the CBC need look no farther than its information programs. The schedule is filled with shows reflecting the fascinating and often brutal reality of events taking place in Canada and around the world. News, current affairs and documentaries dominate every Tuesday and Wednesday night, covering nearly every primetime slot on those evenings.

Vancouver: British Columbia’s production volumes in 2001 dropped 8% in a year rife with anomalies, including the precipitous fall in value of domestic production.
Official tallies, released finally this month, indicate that 197 productions in 2001 generated direct spending of $1.08 billion, the second-best year after 2000, which posted overall volume of $1.18 billion.
The good news is that despite the threat of U.S. writers and actors strikes in the summer of 2001, a slow U.S. television economy and terrorist attacks in the fall, foreign service production was up 12.5% to a record high of $857 million, including 22 features, 19 series, 37 TV movies/miniseries/pilots, three animation titles and three documentaries.

Based on a play by Cape Breton Island’s Daniel MacIvor, with an almost entirely local cast, Marion Bridge is the first feature for both Bill Niven’s Halifax-based Idlewild Films and for Toronto director Wiebke von Carolsfeld. Coproduced with Toronto’s Sienna Films, it wraps five weeks of shooting primarily in Halifax at the end of May.
‘Our director is a dream,’ says Niven, who was initially concerned about working with a first-timer. ‘She wants to be involved in every detail along the way and has a very keen sense of aesthetics.’

It looks like a Merchant Ivory film complete with grand manor estates, Victorian costumes, corset-clad women slapping men in the face and dramatic storytelling so convincing that for a second you actually believe you’re watching a trailer for ‘the world’s first 48-hour epic movie made by women for women.’
In reality, director Martin Granger’s ‘Sin and Sentimentality,’ produced by Toronto’s Avion Films for agency Downtown Partners, aired across Canada in Famous Players cinemas as a mock trailer. It was part of a campaign Granger directed for Labatt-brewed Bud Light.
For his efforts, Granger was honored with a best of series nod at the 2002 Bessies in the directors category.

You might say Ian Mirlin’s career is one defined by circles, if only symbolically.
Mirlin’s first job in Toronto after leaving his native South Africa was at Goodis Goldberg Soren, which at the time was headed by Doug Linton. In April, following a brief retirement, the 52-year-old returned to the ad game, taking a position heading up brand development at Ambrose Carr Linton Carroll, where Linton presides as chairman.
‘I find it in some way quite redemptive that here I am at his agency again,’ says Mirlin, a 30-year veteran of the advertising business. ‘I love patterns like that…there’s just too much order in the universe to ignore.’

For Barry Peterson, cinematography started out as a childhood hobby, but he always knew it would become his career. Peterson was 13 when movies like Star Wars fuelled his dream of working behind the camera. ‘I was a kid with a Super 8 camera and it all evolved from there,’ he says.

The hype around branded content says that the combined forces of audience fragmentation and advanced commercial avoidance technologies will have the effect of devaluing commercial spots to a point where advertising will need to look for an alternate common currency. Proponents insist that with its ability to integrate a brand’s message directly into the flow of programming, branded content is the best logical substitute.

At that strange place where branded content meets convergence, there’s bound to be confusion. There’s been a lot of talk about what constitutes both, but when it comes to actually designing and executing a plan, there’s nowhere to stop and ask for directions. In the case of Cadillac’s ‘Innovating Tomorrow’ project, when the rubber hit the road, it meant mapping out a whole new model for advertising.

The brief was very simple: Make the brand famous and make guys laugh out loud.