Montreal: The Banff Television Festival continues to develop excellent relations with various Asia Pacific industry players, clearly manifested this year with the addition of the new NHK President’s Prize of $25,000 to be awarded annually to the best program in the…

Montreal: The Banff Television Festival continues to develop excellent relations with various Asia Pacific industry players, clearly manifested this year with the addition of the new NHK President’s Prize of $25,000 to be awarded annually to the best program in the…

PSST. Wanna buy a hot idea?
Probably one of the most common legal claims in the film and television industry is that someone ‘stole’ an idea for a series or a motion picture from somebody else.
It’s a problem that affects people on both sides of a pitch. The ‘pitchers’ are afraid of pitching a great idea to someone only to have the other person use it to produce a show without them. ‘Pitchees’ are afraid that if they have a successful show they’ll have to deal with false accusations of stealing ideas.

Montreal: In its most direct form, formatting is a way of transferring expertise. Sellers provide prepackaged recipes and a licence to reproduce a formatted concept within a particular country. From smash ratings game shows to entire network and specialty concepts, the…

Vancouver: There was no distributor to shield the freshman filmmakers behind child welfare feature Protection as they ventured into Vancouver and Toronto theatres June 8. …

Montreal: Jeffery Bear, panel chair of the BTVF Aboriginal Voices seminar, says Zacharias Kunuk’s Camera d’Or win for Atanarjuat – The Fast Runner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival underscores the need for Native filmmakers to defend their original languages and…

The relationship between director and director of photography is ‘somewhat of a marriage,’ says Toronto-based cinematographer David Greene.
The Victorious Films feature Century Hotel marks the first time Greene has worked with Canadian director David Weaver, and the getting-to-know-each-other process consisted of watching many films together prior to preproduction.
‘That was an important starting point for me, because you really have to click with one another in order to do good work,’ the DOP says.

This year’s field of 86 nominees for Rockie Awards includes only five Canadian-connected contenders. Nominations were winnowed from a field of more than 1,000 program entries and include such international luminaries as Friends, Frasier, The Sopranos and The West Wing….

The Women’s Television Network, recently purchased by Corus Entertainment for $205 million, was merely a twinkle in the eye a decade ago.
As early as 1989, Ron Rhodes, working as a ‘hired gun’ on the startup of the Family Channel, discerned a need for a channel that cast its net a little wider.
‘Although we called it the Family Channel we showed Disney movies. And I thought that we really needed a family channel that dealt with family issues and was information-based.’

The CanWest Western Independent Producers Fund initial round of grants has been announced and results include an interesting statistical blip: of the 107 applications received from the four Western provinces, 19 came from Saskatchewan. Of the 52 projects chosen for funding, nine are from the province.
Sandra Green at the CWIPF says she is heartened by the response from what has been to date the lowest-profile Prairie province.

The Okanagan is a lush area in inland British Columbia that markets itself as a summertime vacation destination. But this fall, a film set in the Okanagan might shoot in a location that makes for an unlikely stand-in: the Yukon.
Sean Williamson of Shavick Entertainment in Vancouver was one of the producers included on a familiarization tour organized by the Yukon Film Commission earlier this year. As a result of that tour, he is tentatively planning to return to the Yukon to shoot the feature film Peachland.

Vancouver is known as the location of choice for many service productions – but the homegrown filmmaking community is thriving. And the lifeblood of this resilient indigenous industry? Documentary….

Tween series AD2030 is one of those rarest of Prairie beasts: a Saskatchewan/Alberta/Manitoba coproduction. …

Calgary-based DB Entertainment’s titular president Doug Berquist, a filmmaker since 1973, is almost understated about the genesis of his two-year-old company….

MONTREAL: Blackwatch Communications has filed a ‘notice of intention’ to creditors to reorganize its debt and has hired accounting firm Richter, Usher & Vineberg to handle negotiations and reorganize the company….