Montreal: More than 200 works from 41 countries, including 77 feature films, 92 short films and 50 new media creations, are on the program for the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, Oct. 11-21. The festival, codirected by Claude Chamberlan and Luc Bourdon, is dedicated to international auteur cinema and digital and new media productions. Softimage founder Daniel Langlois is chair of the FCMM board.

Montreal: Digital cinema and special effects, electronic gaming and interactive TV are among conference topic highlights at this year’s 8th edition of the Multimedia International Market, which takes place at Montreal’s Place Bonaventure, Oct. 3-5.

Toronto’s untitled is now representing L.A.-based, Montreal-born director Tim Godsall, filling the comedy hole within the roster executive producer James Davis alluded to in last month’s On the Spot.
Godsall, raised in Toronto, joins untitled from T.O. production house Avion Films, where he had been directing for roughly three years. Like many currently in the industry, Godsall came to directing from the agency side. He started as a copywriter for McCann-Erickson 10 years ago, moved on to Doner Schur Peppler and then Geoffrey Roche & Partners. He also ventured to the U.S. to take a job as an associate creative director with Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners in New York.

Halifax-based producer JD MacCulloch says The Baddeck International New Media Festival is on track to run Oct. 11-13, despite the recent troubles in the world and the financial strains felt by many of the companies the festival is marketed to.

If this year’s Gemini Award nomination list is saturated, once again, by Da Vinci’s Inquest, it’s peppered with the name of series showrunner/producer/director Chris Haddock.

Shots & Chasers tracks who shot what during the previous month. Production companies are invited to fax information for this column as frequently as possible to Dave Lazar or Dustin Dinoff at (416) 408-0870. The next deadline for submissions is Wednesday, Oct. 17.

This is a final reminder for all Canadian commercial producers that your Top Spots entries are due in to On The Spot by Oct. 4.

Cogeco, Bell Globemedia buy TQS

The road to directing for Michael Robison went through years of editing. Now the busy Vancouver-based director – credits include episodes of Andromeda, Tracker, Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict, First Wave and The Outer Limits – has garnered a nomination for best direction in a dramatic series for an Outer Limits episode, ‘Revival,’ starring Gary Busey. His current project is Mysterious Ways for PAX TV and NBC in the U.S.

Jeff August, creative director of Calgary’s White Iron Digital, says although only 20% of his shop’s body of work is commercial production, it certainly makes an impact when a board comes through.
August recently brought home an Emmy Award for outstanding editing on an ESPN spot about the Heisman Trophy. He was nominated in the sports category, competing against himself for his work on ESPN’s 2000 Summer X Games.

Looking to fill a market niche with new digital technologies not readily available at traditional commercial post houses, torontostartv.com, a two-year-old spin-off of infomercial network Toronto Star TV is hoping to capture some of Canada’s post-production business.
torontostartv.com.com is offering digital encoding, Net broadcasts and live webcasting, an ORAD Cyberset ‘O’ system along with digital production and post-production services.
‘We’d definitely like to chew off a bigger piece of the commercial industry,’ says Heather Brunt, torontostartv.com.com‘s operations manager. ‘Given the fact we’re a commercial channel, that was our natural in.’

Montreal: Coproduction with Canada’s two leading European partners, France and the U.K., remains at high levels into 2001, but the industry has to move quickly to deal with big problems with the U.K. and Germany.

Montreal: Telefilm Canada is joining forces with 10 national and provincial organizations, including most of the provincial funding agencies, the CFTPA and the federal government, to launch the Canada banner pavilion at MIPCOM. The new Canada stand is now the second largest at the market after Paramount.

To give his cast and crew an overview of Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story, director Michel Poulette condensed the 300-page script into 30 pages. ‘It’s a very complex story of a contemporary man remembering his past. It starts with the beginning of the century and ends in the sixties. Ten pages were a paragraph,’ he says. ‘We felt the impact over the next few days. In just an hour, everybody had an overview of the story.’