For the past several years YTV has been leveraging its expertise in the youth market to produce well-targeted commercial spots for its advertising partners.
Now the specialty channel is making it official. Corus Entertainment-owned YTV has christened its commercial production division Pester Productions and has announced that it will soon begin to cultivate its own roster of directors.
Tim Cormick, director of co-marketing, Corus Entertainment, television, says developing a separate commercial division is the logical evolution for YTV, which produces programming, Web-based products and has a well-respected research arm.
‘We’ve always got our antenna up for what’s working for kids. That would be our main point of difference,’ he says.

For the 14th year, ad industry good-timers came together this month in support of the Bereaved Families of Ontario and its Big Night Out. This year more than 800 people ate, drank and were merry at the Capitol Event Theatre in Toronto, and helped to raise more than $80,000 for the not-for-profit charity, designed to help the bereaved cope with their losses.

Our picture of the year comes from the eye of none other than David Cronenberg. The ac-claimed director loves his tech toys, and on the Toronto set of his forthcoming feature, Spider, he was never without his digital camera. The photograph, which ran on the Oct. 1 cover of Playback, is of actor Ralph Fiennes, who plays the film’s title character.

Days after receiving approval from the CRTC for its $205-million purchase of WTN, Corus Entertainment announced it will be moving the Winnipeg-based women’s channel into its Toronto television facility.

Citing adverse economic conditions, CTV has withdrawn its application for proposed TV licences to serve the Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo regions of southern Ontario.

Montreal: With limited growth potential for local programming opportunities, more than 200 film and TV producers showed up for a Nov. 12 APFTQ seminar on international financing and coproduction.

The big story in the commercial production industry in 2001 was ‘diversification.’ It is a word that by now should be as familiar to our readers as the varnish on the bar at their favorite pub.

Don McLean, a 40-plus-year veteran of the commercial production industry, is executive producer and president of The Partners’ Film Company, Toronto.

Michael Schwartz and Paola Lazzeri are partners and executive producers at the Toronto-based commercial production company, Avion Films.

Cynthia Heyd is vice-president, director of broadcast production at BBDO Toronto. She has been with BBDO for five years and comes with more than 15 years of both agency and film production experience. Heyd also chairs the Institute of Canadian Advertising’s Broadcast Committee.

Vancouver: B.C.’s new government, awash in cost-cutting initiatives, has challenged the domestic film and television production community to grow to $2 billion by 2004 from $1.2 billion last year.

This industry is full of great lines, and you folks didn’t disappoint us in 2001. Here are a few of our favorite things you’ve told us. Please note this is just for fun, and we acknowledge, quite happily, that all of these quotes have been taken out of context.

The strangest thing about Apple Box Production’s 10th anniversary is that its history spans four decades. Because when you get right down to it, its roots in this industry actually stretch way back to the fall of 1974. Back then it was a mere embryo of a commercial production house called

Toronto’s Chesler/Perlmutter Productions is in production in Toronto on three animal-themed theatrical features. Coproduced with Germany’s Apollo Media and the U.K.’s Grosvenor Park under the banner Animal Tales Productions, the films – Touching Wild Horses, Time of the Wolf and Cybermutt – are budgeted between $4.5 million and $5 million each. As their titles suggest, all three tales involve animals, which the producers feel gives them universal appeal.

Montreal: Somewhere in an isolated border region in 19th century Eastern Europe, village peasants begin an unholy search for two social outcasts falsely accused of murder. The unusual premise sets the scene for Kim Nguyen’s first feature film, Le Marais (The Marsh), an expressionist, art-directed fantasy from Quebec City’s Productions Thalie. Yves Fortin (Un petit vent de panique, Francophonie d’Amerique) is the producer. Francois Leclerc is line producer.
Players include Gregory Hlady, Paul Ahmarani, Gabriel Gascon, Jennifer Morehouse, James Hyndman, Alex Ivanovici, Elyzabeth Walling and Real Bosse.
Leclerc says the production will use a state-of-the-art digital FX and post-production process.