NELVANA and Nickelodeon have expanded their ongoing relationship in a new long-term licence and production deal that gives the Toronto house international rights to two hit Nick series and commits the U.S. specialty net to renew two Nelvana-produced series.

MONTREAL: Montreal and Quebec location promotion interests have opened a service office on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The initiative comes from commissioner Andre Lafond of the Montreal Film & TV Commission, with the active participation of STCVQ-ACTRA, represented by Arden Ryshpan, on-location production liaison officer, and SODEC (Quebec Film and Television Office – BAPE), represented by Martine-Andree Racine, special-project delegate.

THE soundtrack for a Totes’ umbrella ad running in the U.S. is deceptively simple. Soaring organ notes accompany images of a whiz-kid mixing up mysteriously colored liquids in a magician’s lab. A ferocious explosion announces his invention: an umbrella with a built-in flashlight.

ADVERTISERS often struggle with how to make a product or service register with viewers and stand out amongst its competitors. Several companies have made viewers/consumers take notice using popular songs that sometimes become as identifiable with a product as the original artist who performed it. And it seems to work.

Canadian animation, F/X and broadcast design shops are attending SIGGRAPH 2001 in search of more mature versions of software packages already in-house, while software developers are working to address perceived problems through upgrades. Perhaps most important for Canadians are the many networking opportunities of the people kind.

SOMETIMES, the only way to create reality is by making sounds you would never find in nature. Here’s a selection of the lengths to which sound designers have gone to put the snap, crackle and pop into a spot.

THE new digital channel universe is set to explode onto Canadian television screens this fall. While one of the conditions the CRTC imposed on new licence applicants was to propose interactive elements, networks say the day when most viewers will be able to ask a show host questions in real-time through their TVs is still some time away. For now, interactivity means dozens of new websites supporting the fall launches, from sextvthechannel.com to discoveryhealth.ca to ctvtravel.ca.

BRADY Gilchrist has gone to extremes to make a point. The former Marshall Fenn Communications executive is spending the summer sailing the Great Lakes in his high-tech-equipped boat, reporting on his thoughts about the information age and providing a visual record of his travels for his website, adigitallife.net.

media leaders will meet to discuss the state of convergence at Convergence iTV & Beyond, a two-day conference Aug. 13-14 at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Toronto. The conference will open the floor to new media producers, film and television producers and broadcasters, funding agencies, educators, technology manufacturers and cable providers to offer their insights on the future of popular media.

LIZ EUSTACE is the director of production at Trapeze, a Toronto-based company dedicated to the production of broadband entertainment. In this article she describes her travails of pitching new media strategies to traditional TV broadcasters and producers at the Banff Television Festival, which took place June 10-15.

WHILE long-running Canadian-produced series such as Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and LEXX have made news by changing over from film origination to Sony 24p HDCAM, manufacturers are trying to convince the production community that 24p is not the only digital format suitable for dramatic TV. Breakthrough Films’ new Paradise Falls, airing on Showcase, is proving that point by being the country’s first episodic series to shoot on 480p progressive digital, using Panasonic DVCPRO equipment.

NORSTAR Filmed Entertainment has started shooting its psychosexual thriller Darkness Falling – not to be confused with Norstar’s adaptation of Invisible Darkness, Stephen Williams’ controversial account of the Paul Bernardo and Karla Hamolka story that was rumored months ago to be starring Jason Priestley and confirmed to be a low-budget digital feature.

VANCOUVER: Supermodel Kathy Ireland reprises her role as Santa’s daughter in the TV movie Twice Upon A Christmas: Rudolfa’s Revenge, an update of the Once Upon A Christmas MOW shot here in 2000.

SHOOTING is wrapping up in Calgary on the Hallmark Productions miniseries Roughing It. Budgeted at $8.5 million, the two-part, four-hour project is based on the novel by Mark Twain. Roughing It stars James Garner as the old Mark Twain, in tales of the young Twain’s quest for his calling as a writer.

JASON S.T. KOTLER is a lawyer at the Toronto law firm of McMillan Binch and a member of the firm’s KNOWlawTM Group. This article was prepared with the assistance of DENIS FLEMING.