In the current commercial slowdown, many of the directors who continue to work steadily gratefully attribute their success to their reputations for excelling at particular genres or product types. This stands in sharp contrast to higher times when helmers did all they could to resist being pigeonholed.
Many of the directors holding on to that resistance are sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, while those busy on the set say this type of categorization is the only thing keeping them working.

Director/writer: Catherine Martin * Producer/editor: Lorraine Dufour * Cinematographer: Jean-Claude Labrecque * Sound: Marcel Chouinard * Music: Robert M. Lepage * Diary by: Susan Tolusso

Saskatchewan – it’s home to the Green Riders, the mystic prairie and Bill Stampe, commercial director and owner of Cinepost Films. What are the challenges that face a commercial director working in Saskatoon, outside Canada’s major markets? The veteran spot director shares his insights.

With the increasingly powerful state of computer hardware and the many new software features designed to take advantage of that power, the main themes at SIGGRAPH 2001 in Los Angeles included service, support and work-flow streamlining.
At the five-day conference, held in August at the L.A. Convention Centre, software manufacturers imparted ways to make producers’ lives easier and more efficient, while students and producers marveled at the new systems, taking tutorials on-the-spot and attempting to apply the new capabilities to their work-flow challenges.

* Director: Anne Wheeler * Writer: Elyse Friedman * Producer: Gavin Wilding * Cinematographer: David Frazee * Diary by: Kathy Barthel

Zach Math has an equation for you. Take three parts training, one part experience and multiply by confidence and humility, plus one. The results are not in the back of a textbook. They’re listed on the commercial reel of a young Canadian director making waves less than a year into his career in the spot business.

The list of directors at Montreal production house Jet Films reveals helmers with first names including Sylvain, Louis-Pascal and Guillaume. Nestled amidst all this testosterone is Mireille Veillet, the shop’s lone female director. Do industry folk perceive her any differently in this business that is so top-heavy with men?

* Director/writer/cinematographer: Paul Cowan * Producer: Keith Martin * Diary by: Etan Vlessing

* Director/writer: Bill Phillips * Producers: Helen du Toit, Mehra Meh * Cinematographer: John Holosko * Diary by: Dave Lazar

Director: Sturla Gunnarsson * Writer: Ed Riche * Executive producer: Sam Feldman * Producer: Paul Pope * Diary by: Louise Leger

The phone in Laurie-Marie Baranyay’s apartment won’t stop ringing. On the other end are those banes of a first-time independent filmmaker’s existence: credit card collection agencies.

Inertia marks the directing debut of filmmaker/musician Sean Garrity and the first foray into producing for Brendon Sawatzky, both based in Winnipeg. According to Garrity, the film he set out to make was to be played out like a number of musicians jamming on stage. His vision was to put together a film born through improvisation.

* Director: Lynne Stopkewich * Producers: Jessica Fraser, Dean English * Cinematographer: Bob Aschmann * Diary by: Dustin Dinoff

It is the classic challenge in Canadian cinema: how to achieve quality results on a modest budget. To this end, smaller productions have traditionally opted for 16mm or Super 16 origination, and recently shooting on digital video has been in vogue. But in the case of Poor Superman, a $1.3-million feature shot by Daniel Vincelette for writer/director Brad Fraser, producer Ken Mead of realtime films insisted on the 35mm format. To make this economically feasible, he believed Multivision might provide the answer.

Asghar Massombagi is the director of Khaled, which premiers in the Perspective Canada program at this year’s Toronto International Film festival. Khaled is his first feature film and this is his first TIFF.