Fine Cut Magazine 2011

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Lawrence — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 20:11:50 +0000

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Showcasing Talent from Canada & Around the World

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:38 +0000

: Executive Director Gregor Ash addresses AFF audience – All photos courtesy Chris Gerwosky

By Emma Brown

For thousands of people in the entertainment industry, the Atlantic Film Festival (AFF) is a huge ten day celebration drawing the year’s best films from across Canada and the around world.

For Gregor Ash, the executive director and the face of the AFF, it’s the best job in Atlantic Canada.

Ash, who joined the festival as a volunteer more than 20 years ago, was drawn to the job by a life long love of movies. He grew up in Newfoundland and became a devoted movie lover at a young age. The festival takes place each year in Halifax.

“We didn’t have a movie theatre in town,” remembers Ash. “So every Sunday afternoon one of the local bars would break out an old 16mm and play whatever old classics they could get their hands on.”

He recalls afternoons spent watching old Errol Flynn swashbucklers, a variety of Abbott and Costello comedies, and classic Hollywood suspense films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. But it wasn’t until Ash was a teen and saw the movie Zulu Dawn, about the 1879 Battle of Isandlwana between the British imperial army and the native Zulu warriors, that he realized movies could do more than entertain, they could stir a person’s sense of moral outrage. “My grandfather was an old Empire Loyalist,” says Ash. “And he used to sing Rule Britannia to me when I was a kid. But watching Zulu Dawn I lost my love affair with the British Empire.”

Lia Rinaldo became the festival director in 2001. Like Ash, it was Rinaldo’s love of movies that led her to the AFF, where she has spent the last 20 years happily combining work with pleasure. With the help of seven other people, she selects the films the festival will showcase. Rinaldo estimates the group watches over 1,500 movies every year before they narrow their final list down to between 175-250 films. The process is an arduous one that keeps the group extremely busy. “We research year round, travel to other events and then spend from May to August watching as many as we can together as a group,” says Rinaldo.

Although the AFF is an international festival, it has a strong commitment to local talent and every year it seeks to provide a platform for the finest films from Atlantic Canada. “There is so much talent here on the East Coast. We’re pretty lucky. We focus about a third of our program annually on the region and the community is very supportive of their home grown talent – there are always full houses,” says Rinaldo.

Carsten Knox is the special issues editor for The Coast, a Halifax newspaper. He covers the AFF for the paper each year. What impresses Knox most about the festival is the excitement it generates for local talent. “You’ve got to get tickets early for anything that was shot in the region – full length or shorts – as those screenings sell out first,” he says.

Laura Dawe is an independent filmmaker from Halifax whose film Light is the Day, debuted at the AFF last year. The film was made in 20 days with a crew of 11 people for just over $15,000. “Everyone worked long, sweating, swearing, smiling hours for free. So, we kept the overhead low,” Dawe says. Most of the money used to make the film came from friends and other people in their community, while local bands donated money raised from shows and music for the film’s soundtrack. Talking about the festival’s role in supporting her film debut last year, Dawe was incredibly enthusiastic.

“AFF premiered Light and I can never thank them enough. They viewed it at a really early stage, but they saw potential and trusted us to deliver. There is nowhere else in the world I would have wanted to unveil the movie. Everyone with the festival was just beyond helpful,” she says. “Also, the opening night party was at Citadel Hill and I’ve always wanted to get way too wasted on free vodka in there so – check.”

Ash remembers the night well. “We screened the opening film in three cinemas, and then about 2,000 people attended the party afterwards. We had a big tent, but we couldn’t afford to put a floor down.So the tent is on this parade square, in the middle of this historic fort – but people just partied. The next day they posted pictures of their shoes on Facebook, covered in mud, and some with broken heels.”

The support that Dawe received from the festival had a huge impact in terms of generating publicity and getting the word out about her film. “Getting into the AFF got me onto the cover of The Coast, which, in Halifax is like getting on to the cover of Vanity Fair, or so I’ve always thought,” says Dawe. The festival is always happy to help artists whenever possible. Still, they don’t have the resources to fly in as many filmmakers as they’d like, particularly given the rising costs of films. “One of the things we can control is how we treat people and the kind of experience they have with us,” Ash says.

Unfortunately, times have not been easy. Compared to the Toronto and Vancouver film festivals, Ash says the AFF attracts a significantly smaller audience which means less money generated by tickets sales.

In her capacity as festival director, Rinaldo says, “money is a constant cause of stress in the cultural non-profit world and budgets are at the mercy of so many varying factors from year to year.” A shaky economy is one of those factors.

“The last few years have been difficult for art organizations, because the recession has really affected corporate sponsorship,” says Ash. But despite hard times, the festival remains dedicated to promoting artistic talent at home and around the world.

“It can be a tough industry but it has at its core a soul which is giving creative voice to the visions that pop into people’s heads,” says Ash. For a life-long lover of movies, what could be better than being a part of that?

Extending the Invite

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:38 +0000

By Michael Radoslav

Photo by Michael Radoslav

Breaking into show business in Canada can often be a herculean effort. Our country is known for having some of the toughest entry requirements for its performers union, ACTRA. This has been at times a discouraging reality for aspiring actors.

In November 2010, however, ACTRA cut its credit requirements for new members in half, from six credits to three – effectively welcoming, rather than restricting, membership. The vote in favour of making these new modifications was a resounding 82.1 per cent.

ACTRA Toronto, the largest chapter in the country, spearheaded the move to give those with the acting dream a better shot.

“The time frame was gapping larger rather than narrowing” says Heather Allin, president of ACTRA Toronto. “We thought six credits as a bar was set so high that not only do people have trouble getting over it, they give up before even giving it a try.”

The impact is already being felt. Marlene Cahill is the branch representative for ACTRA Newfoundland, a region where projects are primarily union. Although 95 per cent of productions in Newfoundland go through ACTRA they still witnessed a surge in enrolment. About 20 per cent of the branch’s members held between three and six credits, so they became eligible with the requirement change.
[pullquote]“It’s nice for people to feel embraced by the union instead of intimidated or estranged by it.”
- Bryn McAuley, YEAA[/pullquote]

The move is a boon to young performers, many of whom joined as apprentices before gaining enough credits to reach full membership status. “They’ve been telling us for years that this is taking forever,” says Karl Pruner, director of communication of ACTRA Toronto. Pruner says young actors grouped together and presented well-founded and economically sound concerns, but the jobs to help them reach their goals simply were not there.

Despite the new rules, Pruner maintains ACTRA still has some of the toughest standards in the world, and jobs are still not as plentiful as in the past. But, he says, that little bit of give will go a long way in helping emerging talent in Canada.

The Toronto Youth Caucus was replaced in February 2011 by the Young Emerging Actors Assembly (YEAA). Created for ambitious young performers, the group – founded by Bryn McAuley and Eli Goree – aims to offer more opportunities to aspiring actors.

“I started it to help the 18-year-old version of myself,” says McAuley. She has been a member of ACTRA for more than a decade, joining as a six-year-old.

YEAA aims to open communication with young actors in Toronto, highlight the success and accomplishments of young performers, and host events to bring the community together and introduce them to members of the industry.

Eli Goree and Bryn McAuley, founders of the Young Emerging Actors Assembly (YEAA), photo courtesy of YEAA

McAuley was proud of a recent event where young actors received feedback on their demo reels from decision makers in the field. At the ACTRA conference in late February, McAuley says she saw more young people than ever in attendance. She credits the change in regulations and events YEAA has been hosting for the turnout.

“I saw a lot of young actors at the conference who were getting their third credit on the day, and were very excited about that,” she says. “It’s nice for people to feel embraced by the union instead of intimidated or estranged from it.”

One performer who received his final credit that day was Tony Babcock, a 23-year-old actor from Toronto. He became an ACTRA apprentice in November and thanks to the changes gained full membership in just four months.

“I needed to get to that point where I felt like I was capable of doing the big work,” Babcock says. “I didn’t want to join prematurely, I wanted to wait until I was ready.”

“I feel like I do have a support system in place now, like I do have them looking out for me,” he says.

Vanessa Broze, a 27-year-old ACTRA apprentice in Toronto, is working towards her final credit.

She says she was intimidated in the past by the steep requirements and decided to go the non-union route instead. She became an apprentice this past December after hearing about the changes.

“I thought that the six credits were pretty daunting,” says Broze. “Then they lowered it to three credits and I felt safe joining.”

The Toronto youth group is standing alone in the country at the moment. McAuley says there are no plans for nationwide expansion but would gladly talk with anyone interested in starting a group within their own chapter.

Right now YEAA is focused on promoting themselves to the community in Toronto. “It’s still quite underground,” McAuley says. “We have a huge percentage of our demographic to still reach.”

Many young performers rely heavily on non-union projects when starting out. A change made to include degrees and certificates from post-secondary institutions as credits helps cut back on that need. The goal is to move new actors closer to ACTRA membership while steering them away from non-union productions.

Karen Woolridge, public relations for ACTRA Toronto, says the initiative helps protect new actors. Woolridge was frustrated watching students come out of institutions and walk into non-union work because they were convinced it would help their career. She says the result was “a whole resume of non-union work that no one respects.”

Broze was initially advised to pursue non-union roles to help break into the industry. She says she had some great experiences working non-union, sufromch as meeting her fiancé, a cinematographer on her first project. However, she also had bad experiences.

Babcock also found non-union work a mixed blessing. “It was a learning experience, there were some up’s and down’s,” he says. Babcock recognizes the need for young actors to take on roles that present themselves and says that kind of work is fine as a starting point, but not as a career.

Broze agrees joining the union is necessary to pursue acting as a serious profession. “Some people are just happy to work even if it’s free,” she says. “You almost feel like you’re paying your dues when you’re a young actor doing that, and that’s okay, but hey, you can’t keep doing that forever.”

Saving Churchill’s Island: The NFB’s Film Conservation Efforts

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:38 +0000

By Alex Zakrzewski

: From Churchill’s Island – Courtesy NFB

Churchill’s Island holds the unique distinction of being the first Oscar-winning Canadian film and documentary. Produced by the National Film Board (NFB), it was also until recently, literally rotting away in vaults and archives across North America, forgotten by the generations of filmmakers it unknowingly influenced.

Thanks to the NFB’s commitment to film conservation, Churchill’s Island is in the process of being restored, digitized and preserved in new media formats for film enthusiasts everywhere to appreciate.

A 20-minute newsreel, Churchill’s Island was produced in 1941 during the Second World War as part of two separate NFB film series called Canada Carries On and The World in Action. Albert Ohayon, curator of the NFB’s English collection, explains film series such as these were screened theatrically before feature presentations and were an important means of informing and mobilizing the Canadian public for the war effort. Having personally viewed nearly 7,000 films during his 27-year tenure with the NFB, Ohayon says Churchill’s Island “stands head and shoulders above films that were made in that era.”

The film uses captured enemy footage and first-person interviews (both a rarity at the time) to bring home to Canadian audiences the determination of a besieged England. “The film is very striking visually and the message is very, very strong,” Ohayon says. “England is under siege but the people are working together to counter the threat of the Axis powers.” Even 70 years later, it’s difficult not to feel moved as the booming voice of narrator Lorne Greene reassures audiences that the English people themselves “stand once more at the watchtowers and the bastions of Churchill’s Island.”

Ohayon explains that because of its international focus, The World in Action series also found an audience in the United States. But as powerful as the film’s message was, people weren’t interested in revisiting it after the war, he says. As a result, Churchill’s Island and other NFB war material was left to languish in vaults and archives. The effort to save the film is part of the NFB’s plan to restore, digitize and preserve on new media formats some 13,000 titles dating back to 1939.
[pullquote]“The film is very striking visually and the message is very, very strong.”
- Albert Ohayon, NFB[/pullquote]
Richard Cournoyer, laboratory and conservation supervisor, explains that the first step in any project is compiling all available film material. Images captured on 16mm or 35mm film went through a series of processes between the original camera negative and the final version sent to theatres. One of the immediate problems Cournoyer and his team have faced with Churchill’s Island is tracking down all the available material which is spread across the NFB vaults, the National Archives and the Academy of Motion Pictures in Hollywood.

All material is then examined for damage, fungus, and what Cournoyer calls “vinegar syndrome” – acidic molecules that infect the film causing decay detectable by a vinegar-like smell.

The next step is to create a Digital Source Master (DSM). Each DSM contains a film’s component parts (sound, image, effects) and segments (titles, subtitles, credits) in all existing languages. Images are digitized using one of two devices, an Arriscan scanner or a Datacine. The sound is digitized using Pro Tools. Two separate teams work to treat and restore image and sound separately, and as close to the film’s original state as possible, before synchronizing the components. The result is a Digital Master (DM), which along with the DSM is saved to the NFB archives and kept should future restoration and improvement be needed. Once the DM is complete, it’s compressed into a mezzanine file from which the film can be exported onto a range of digital formats including DVD, web download and mobile platforms.

Cournoyer says that the preservation process has come a long way since the NFB’s conservation efforts began in 1991. He laughs when recalling the initial method for detecting “vinegar syndrome” was a student hired to go around smelling the film cans. “We stopped that because it might be dangerous,” he says.

The NFB’s film preservation efforts can be at times controversial. Thomas Waugh, professor of cinema studies at Concordia University and an expert on documentary film, is critical of certain aspects of the restoration and digitization process. While Waugh agrees that important pieces of Canada’s film heritage should be preserved, he questions the artistic merit of some of their choices – including Churchill’s Island. “The fact that it won an Academy Award does not necessarily mean it’s a very special and wonderful film,” Waugh says. “It’s like an everyday film from the NFB and it’s wonderful in that respect but it doesn’t stand out from the others.”

Artistic tastes aside, Waugh says the main problem with the NFB’s restoration and digitization efforts is language. During the digitization process all language versions of a film are scanned, restored and archived, and then made available to audiences. However, Waugh says that not enough is done to make films originally produced in only one official language available in both, if only with subtitles. “The restoration activities should be taking a remedial approach to this,” he says. “They shouldn’t be trapped by the original linguistic policy of the NFB. What they’ve done so far in making up for historical errors is pretty disappointing.”

Cournoyer says it is too soon to say when Churchill’s Island will be fully restored and digitized. Material and technicalities aside, the NFB is also a production house – Cournoyer and his skeleton staff of seven have to split their time between conservation and working on the new productions. He says it takes his team nine hours of work to preserve just one hour of film. Despite these difficulties, Cournoyer takes solace in the fact that once everything is digitized, it will be preserved hopefully forever. “It’s going to take us twenty years to do that if there’s no problems, no surprises, no end of funding,” he says. “Ideally, we need special funding, but nobody has that.”

Tangled Roots: The IMAX Legacy

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:38 +0000

By Phillip Maciel

White sand between toes. The sun beaming down on a warmed, glowing face. A cool, gentle breeze blowing off the nearby ocean. The inevitability of retirement prompts images of the most relaxing of possibilities, where freedom is finally complete.

Serial Number One: The First IMAX Projector - Courtesy Shirley Hughes

They probably don’t imagine being locked away in a dark, musty warehouse, wrapped up and sitting on a pallet.

Serial Number One, the very first IMAX projector in history, has such a fate. It’s probably for the best – beach sand would likely disagree with its machinery. But there’s good news. “We took the projector out in a way to preserve the machine, so it took us a little longer, and cost us a little more, but we didn’t chop it up into little bits and carry it out the door,” says Mike Hazelton, the manager of attractions at Ontario Place.

The theme park, one of Toronto’s most popular attractions, is home to the Cinesphere, which has housed Number One since 1971. At that time, Ontario Place could brag about being the only location in the world with a permanent installation of an IMAX projector. If you wanted to see an IMAX movie, you had to go to Toronto; there was no other option.

The projector had impressed audiences a year earlier in Osaka, Japan, where IMAX was introduced to the world by a group of Canadian filmmakers.

The basic idea started with projecting regular 35mm film on a 360-degree screen for an unparalleled sense of depth. Instead of using various slide projectors for all the screens necessary to get that 360-degree effect, IMAX movies use 70mm film, much larger than the normal 35mm, in order to put all of those images onto one filmstrip.

Tiger Child, the very first IMAX film, played for six months at Expo ‘70 in Japan. After that, Number One was moved to Toronto’s Cinesphere, which offers the biggest cinema screen in North America.

Hazelton, who has been with Ontario Place since 2004, explains, “because it was a one of a kind technology, everything about IMAX happened here.” Everything, from making the movies to editing and right down to mixing the soundtrack, was done using Number One in Toronto – there was no number two.

No one knows this better than the Cinesphere’s current projectionist, Dave Callaghan Jr. He projected Number One’s final film, North of Superior, in December 2010. It was a sentimental note for Number One to go out on, given that Callaghan’s father, the late David Sr., ran the same film using the same machine almost 40 years earlier on opening night.

Around that same time, Callaghan Jr. was already learning the trade, having spent so much time in theatres. “When everyone else is going out for entertainment, that’s when a projectionist goes to work,” he says. “I’d be home from school and my father was always working. So in a sense, in order to see my father, I would go to work to see him.”

Callaghan Jr., now 58 years of age, is still projecting. It’s delicate work – once a projector starts up, the film goes at an incredibly high rate of speed. One wrong move and the damage could be disastrous.

[pullquote]“To continue to be relevant 40 years after we started, we need to have access to the latest film products that are coming out there.”
-Mike Hazleton, manager of attractions[/pullquote]

But it seems Number One was an extremely trustworthy and gentle machine. “There are instances where prints can literally be damaged before they get through their first weekend. With the IMAX projector, you were hard-pressed to tell exactly how long a print had been run,” Callaghan says.

Still, Number One isn’t the same machine it once was. The image quality was still impeccable, but Number One was constantly being modified in order for it to keep up with the times. The lamp house was changed to improve efficiency and brightness. A new rotor allowed for faster reel speeds that could play double the frames per second – a modification that was only ever made to a select few projectors in order to play high definition. “Because it was a work in progress, especially in the first ten years, that thing changed dramatically,” Hazelton says. “It’s probably 50 per cent the same as what the machine sort of ran like when it was originally put in.”

Perhaps most important to contemporary audiences, Number One went from being able to only play films around 20 minutes long to feature-length films. After learning to raise reels above the other and overlap them, “they found a way to run films up to two and a half hours long, so we could run Avatar or even the Harry Potters,” Callaghan says.

The old adage ‘out with the old, in with the new’ seems fitting for Number One’s 40-year tale. There are bigger and better things for the Cinesphere, and Hazelton admits, “to continue to be relevant 40 years after we started, we need to have access to the latest film products that are coming out there. IMAX 3-D and 3-D film in general is obviously at the forefront right now, so for us to have access to that inventory and catalogue of films, we need to go in that direction.”

In early February, Jennifer Kerr, media relations manager at the Cinesphere, told Fine Cut they have a 1.8 million dollar budget for renovations this year and plan to purchase a new IMAX film projector with 3-D capabilities. They also want to clean the outside of the Cinesphere, something that hasn’t been done since Number One was first installed. “Then we’re doing all new seating, a new lobby, and a new screen,” added Kerr, all in hopes of being ready to open for the May 2011 long weekend.

With a new projector taking its place, Hazelton says there are options for Number One’s future, but nothing’s been determined. Callaghan wants the projector in some sort of museum, perhaps even on display at Ontario Place itself. Number One will simply have to wait to find out what kind of retirement plan it’s been given.

While the Cinesphere remains under renovation, Callaghan has been projecting films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. The equipment he’s using is newer, the setting much jazzier, but praise for Number One seems to flow naturally for him. “There’s very little that you can say on an engineering level – and just in practice as a projectionist – that was not just absolutely first rate about the IMAX projector, even going back to the first day.”

It seems as though Callaghan and Number One’s histories are intertwined. Now Callaghan is looking on as his partner exits stage left, but the Cinesphere will always be the world’s first permanent IMAX theatre, and Number One will always be the world’s first IMAX projector. “I feel extremely fortunate that I can work at an IMAX booth, and it’s a presentation second to none,” says Callaghan sentimentally of his time spent with Number One. This is the end of a legacy, both for the Callaghans and the IMAX technology. Let’s just hope Number One can finally find its own version of that warm and sunny beach.

Final Cut Pro: New Industry Standard?

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:38 +0000

By Thomas Csercsa

What do the movies Super Size Me, 300, The Simpson’s Movie, and The Social Network all have in common?
Not much, other than the fact that they were all edited using Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

These successful films put Final Cut on the map as a legitimate option for production companies, but they still only represent a moderate sample of movies produced in Hollywood. That’s mainly because anywhere from 80 to 90 per cent of Hollywood films are still edited using Avid, a company that introduced non-linear editing software more than 20 years ago.

“There was a running joke in the industry that said Avid is now 99 per cent off, because Final Cut, for $1,000 could do everything the $300,000 version of Avid could do at the time,” says Adam Wiseman, a graduate of the Toronto Film School who has worked as a freelance editor for a variety of production companies using both Avid and Final Cut Pro. “I know an editor who mortgaged his house just to pay for an Avid system.”

Wiseman, who now works for 9 Story Entertainment in Toronto, says they are two very different systems, but they are the two main contenders in the market. Now that Avid’s software has been made available at a lower price, it’s become possible to compare the products on a much more even level.

The main consideration has to be that neither of these editing systems is flawless. What works for some editors is a complete deal-breaker for others.

“Some people, once Final Cut came out and it became more stable, were like ‘good riddance, I hated Avid, it’s too complicated, there were too many steps that didn’t need to be there,’” says Wiseman.

As an editor at 9 Story, Wiseman’s most recent project has been editing Almost Naked Animals, a weekend cartoon on YTV.

: YTV’s Almost Naked Animals in Final Cut Pro- All photos courtesy 9 Story Entertainment

After editing an episode with Final Cut, Wiseman hands it off to co-workers who work with Avid, so the file must be in XML format to cross platforms.

“The limitation was previously that I could have all my edit points, but if I had a transition between scenes like a wipe or a fade, it wouldn’t preserve those,” says Wiseman. “XML preserves the edit points no matter what program you’re using, and then you can re-link the footage.”

Avid also has a solid reputation among experienced editors who were already working in the industry before competitors began introducing their own non-linear systems. “We get the question all the time from younger people: ‘when did Avid come around?’ For kids coming out of school, typically they’ve been using Final Cut, and when they see our tools, they think we’re new,” says Kent Petersen, senior application specialist at Avid Canada. “We’ve had to market towards young people so that the younger generations are more aware of our product.”

Although younger generations have yet to fully embrace what Avid offers, broadcasters across the country have been using it since it’s been available.

One advantage of using Avid in newsrooms is the ability to work across platforms, says Peterson. “In a news environment, they have always been very centered on PCs. Because our application is cross-platform, if you decide to change computer systems, you can do that without needing to buy new software.”

Avid’s industry-leading storage capabilities also help keep the system in Canadian newsrooms. “We’re offering not just editing, but shared storage,” Petersen explains. “We have a whole suite that works for the broadcaster, in the sense of shared storage.”

Craig Sansom has spent much of the last 27 years editing stories together in various newsrooms in cities all over the world, including Toronto.

When he first started in the business, non-linear software was a fantasy. He says the strides made in the past couple of decades mean the possibilities for the next few years are virtually limitless. “When the first Avid came out, it was like walking on the moon. It was amazing, the fact that you could manipulate a timeline.”

Although Final Cut Pro has expanded into the professional film industry, Sansom says Canadian newsrooms haven’t made the switch to Apple’s software but he can see that as an option down the road.

Andy Coon, an independent documentary filmmaker and producer, has used Final Cut Pro exclusively since he began working in the industry.

“I’m interested in learning Avid, but the problem is that it’s so expensive. You have to have top of the line equipment to use it, unlike Final Cut Pro, which will go on pretty much any Apple system,” he says. “You’ll see a lot of independent filmmakers using Final Cut Pro and even Hollywood filmmakers are using Final Cut Pro. I would say it’s creeping into the industry and it’s made a big impact.”

Gone are the days when using Apple’s editing software was disrespected in the industry. “I remember going to jobs and they would laugh at me,” says Coon. Now he’s teaching them.

“It’s come a long way.”

“Any Town, USA” is Here

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:38 +0000

By Ruth Van Dyken

: Robin Williams in Taylor’s Tea Room in Dundas, Ontario – Courtesy Taylor’s Tea Room

A quiet stroll through the “Valley Town” of Dundas will carry you into the heart of 19th century charm. With their heavy white mouldings, arched window frames and high facades, the shop-buildings bespeak their century-old heritage. And all throughout the valley people are alive with a small-town cheer and fellowship that has never faded. Shopkeepers wave and usher you towards their wares, strangers greet you with a friendly smile. The crowd of “regulars” at the coffee shop – a jovial bunch of old fogies – chuckle when you walk in.

It’s a walk back through time, back into the best of Canada’s lively past. Surely this is how all Canadian towns looked 150 years ago. But what’s that? A line-up of American flags? The distinguished town hall looks like it was pulled from upstate Maine and plunked on these streets. Here is hometown America transplanted in Dundas, Ontario.

For all its absurdity, the scene isn’t altogether uncommon. Ironically, filmmakers are looking north of the border to recreate that revered essence of Americanism – any town, USA. And Ontario’s towns are cashing in.

What entices American filmmakers to head north? For many production companies, the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. While the rising Canadian dollar has brought financial challenges, Ontarian partners are working hard to keep filmmakers hooked by offering a comprehensive package of diversity and expertise.

Jacqueline Norton, manager of Hamilton’s film and television office, described the thrill citizens get when famous actors come to town. “Robin Williams was amazing,” Norton says of Man of the Year in Dundas, “He petted little dogs that were on the street, he bought a bicycle from the cycle shop … People don’t forget that.”
[pullquote]“We get kind of addicted.” – Deborah Tiffin[/pullquote]

Other major titles filmed in town include The West Wing, The Incredible Hulk and Warehouse 13. Port Perry has frequently flown the red, white and blue for movies like Welcome to Mooseport, Kill Shot and Happy Town. Niagara Falls has had notables like Fever Pitch, Superman II and of course, the classic 1953 film Niagara starring Marilyn Monroe.

It’s a long list of names. But with the loonie virtually at par with the greenback, many are asking whether the future of these small-town sets will be as bright as their starlit past. It’s a tough question. Hosting towns have experienced a lull over the past few years, but some report a comeback. Donna Zuchlinski, Ontario Film Commissioner at the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC), says the dollar’s rise “hasn’t had as big an impact as we might have expected.” She points out that Ontario’s competitive tax credits, as well as its comprehensive services work to offset this. In fact, this “service package” is what all parties are working toward.

Realizing the economic profit film productions bring to town (Closing the Ring, for instance, commissioned the building of an entire house in Port Perry) the Scugog Township has contracted a film liaison. Deborah Tiffin has filled this full-time position since 2004, connecting the township to filmmakers. She handles permits and other paperwork, mediating between production staff and the community and finding locations for the desired film sets. Acting as a mediating link, Tiffin makes Scugog more film-friendly. And she loves doing it. “We get kind of addicted,” she jokes.

In what she calls the “small town with a big reputation,” Sarah Wood works as manager of business development for Niagara Parks Commission. “Certainly Niagara Falls has always been unique because it has an icon that you can only get in one location,” she laughs, but points out that the Falls are only a part of the Niagara film package. A recent and exciting development has been the addition of retired power plants as sets. With their massive proportions and cavernous tunnels, the plants are ideal for stunts in action films or as sets for laboratories, power plants or just plain gigantic warehouses. “These are unique properties, they’re new properties and they haven’t been over-filmed,” she says. “Especially for film crews from major television and motion pictures, the plants are a lucrative gem, the unknown that is out there that you’ve just got to get your hands on.”

Niagara’s police services are often enlisted for security and local knowledge. Wood and her staff are there to walk producers through legalities and keep them out of trouble. And of course, being situated between the United States and Toronto has its benefits. These are all part of the competitive package Niagara has to offer.

: A coffee shop in downtown Dundas, Ontario – photo by Ruth Van Dyken

The city periodically hosts familiarization tours that showcase these assets to producers. “Film crews at Niagara are a perfect fit,” Wood says. “We know how to work with film crews, we have the services to be able to serve them, but we also know how to work with major film stars.”

Back in Dundas, the town is so popular as a set that production requests are actively filtered. Finding the ideal fit is in everybody’s best interest, says Norton. In addition to it’s “small town anywhere” look, Dundas has beautiful views of the Niagara escarpment, extensive rural areas and historic homes. “It’s got everything,” Norton says. “It’s got older buildings, it’s got a small industrial area, it’s got waterfalls, it’s got so many things that add up to a really neat community.”

Norton says there is a lot of “stickhandling” necessary to minimize the interference of production on shop merchants. She advises producers to pre-plan every step. Locked schedules are very difficult to work with as both merchant and production needs have to be filled. Filming during Christmas is usually out of the question, and Sunday through Wednesday are preferred above the rest of the week.

The OMDC has a film division devoted to selling the province to filmmakers. Their services – which can come at no charge to the production company – include sourcing locations and providing connections with industry professionals and officials. Zuchlinski says the province’s great infrastructure, highly trained crews, varied locations and competitive tax credits are just some of the reasons producers choose Ontario. The OMDC has a full-time marketing agent in Los Angeles to promote Ontario to companies there. Zuchlinski says production companies can cash in on “a tax credit of 25 per cent of their eligible spending, which includes labour, equipment rentals, studios and location fees.” Credits like these help to explain the production trends of the past few years.

Predictably, 2008 showed annual foreign investment in Ontario’s film industry at less than half of 2007 figures. Yet the market bounced back with a $5 million increase in 2009 and more than recovered in 2010. OMDC statistics show the year closed at $48 million: that’s $13 million more than 2007 figures. Zuchlinski says the enhanced tax credits helped the market recover.

As the film commission eases production challenges in Ontario and connects them to competitive credits, the OMDC is yet another player working to bring American productions to Ontario.

And how do citizens view the “Americanization” of their hometowns? For many Dundas merchants, the hassle film crews cause is generally worth the publicity they bring. Colleen House, owner of Amaretto’s Ladies Wear says even though she’s “not easily dazzled,” the filming can be fun when people like Robin Williams come to town. “He’s a warm personality, accommodating to his fans. He allows people to get close to him.”

Norton sees the publicity as a positive factor for the “valley people”. “When West Wing came to Hamilton, it had a real cult following. We had phone calls from across Canada wanting to do interviews about this little town of Dundas and the filming of West Wing,” she said. “The residential community in Dundas loves the filming. They’re quite tickled by seeing stars walk around the street.”

[cincopa AMDAkk6u5U5Z]

Still Getting Stiffed: A Festival for the Rejected

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:10 +0000

By Samar Ismail

: Filmmaker and creator of Stiffed, Michael Laicini – Photo by Samar Ismail

After their movie was rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival, filmmaker Michael Laicini and producer David Amito felt heartbroken, depressed, and dejected.

Those feelings didn’t last long, as dejection turned to innovation when they decided to start their own film festival strictly for the rejected: Stiffed.

The allusion to TIFF is clear, deliberate, and meant to be in good humour. Born in a moment of misery, their film festival turned out to be a great success and gave others who had been stiffed by TIFF the opportunity to showcase their talents.

“We had these real hopes and fantasies built into TIFF accepting our film,” says Amito. “When they didn’t, when we got that standard issue TIFF rejection letter, it was really heartbreaking.” The idea of creating their own film festival was like a bolt of lightning, says Laicini. “The idea just sort of hit us.”

“What’s stopping us from showing our movie in Toronto – during the Toronto film festival and maybe even grabbing some attention away from that festival in the process? And from that thought process, we invented this film festival,” he explains.

Originally, the intention was to only screen their movie but the idea quickly evolved into something bigger. “It occurred to us that we could make this a bigger deal,” says Laicini. “There’s hundreds of people in our exact same position who just got their rejection letters.”

Laicini and Amito wanted Stiffed to be an avenue for other filmmakers rejected by TIFF to screen their movies because they know how difficult it is to break into the film industry. “You kind of already have to be a somebody to be accepted into the Toronto film festival,” says Laicini. “And it’s not always fair.”

In its first year, Stiffed was held at the Camera Bar in downtown Toronto on the last night of TIFF and featured 13 short films of different genres. One film was by Eva Ziemsen, a Humber film professor and Laicini’s former teacher. Her documentary, A Conversation with Lars von Trier, won the Stiffed Spirit Award. Ziemsen faced difficulties in the making of her documentary because main subject and namesake Lars von Trier would not agree to be interviewed – but Ziemsen persisted until she got one. Perseverance in the face of rejection resonates very clearly with the Stiffed’s message.

Ziemsen felt honoured to receive the Spirit Award and says with a laugh, “it just goes to show that it’s a very small industry and the people who you teach are the ones who are going to be letting you into their film festival.”

Laicini and Amito “didn’t pout, they didn’t take it as a negative. They created something new which probably is going to have a lot of momentum and support because they’re not alone,” Ziemsen says. “There’s many people who are rejected and to kind of celebrate the people who were not included but deserve to be shown, I think that’s such a positive outcome out of a rejection.”

Ziemsen shares that “never give up” mantra: “I think it’s really important for any filmmaker who is rejected from something to know that it’s not the end of the world – and sometimes being rejected makes you go much bigger and better than you thought you could. So sometimes a rejection will make you grow and think of a more innovative way to do something than had you been accepted.”

Photo courtesy Stiffed Film Festival

Still, Amito and Laicini respect the larger festival and made it very clear that Stiffed was not in any way meant to insult TIFF, nor do they want to be an adversary. “The reality is, we would say that if a filmmaker is starting out, there’s no way we can say just submit to Stiffed, you should submit to TIFF,” Amito says. “I mean, it’s a huge festival and it stands to give you a lot of exposure, let’s not dance around that. That’s why TIFF is great. So submit to TIFF, it’s just that if you don’t get accepted, there’s another avenue to look at.”

“We don’t care about trumping the Toronto Film Festival or being more popular or being better or any of those things,” says Laicini. “It’s not really a competition for us. How we like to look at Stiffed is not as a competitor but an extension of their film festival.”

A dream come true for Laicini would be if TIFF one day reached out to Stiffed as a sponsor. “Although we play with being combatant, antagonistic with Toronto, we ultimately just want to be their little brother,” jokes Laicini.

Laicini would like for the impact of Stiffed to be “Rockyesque. It has the quality of the underdog, as in it doesn’t matter how many times someone puts me down or says no or says that maybe I’m not good enough or whatever, I’m not going to let that stop me from doing what I want to do.”

Optimism was essential to their success. Rejection is already hard enough; Amito and Laicini only had around a month to organize the entire festival.

“It was a lot of hassle to find the venue and finally to find submissions. In under four weeks we had to put so much word out there to get people to know that there’s this other film festival,” says Laicini.“We paid for a ton of advertising; we threw posters up all over the city.”

They plastered eye-catching and iconic posters throughout Toronto. Vancouver-based graphic designer Chris von Szombathy brought the poster to life, and said it “was going to be one of those things that will definitely leave an impression. No doubt about it.” Von Szombathy says the provocative image – the CN tower and two strategically placed film reels – left a positive impression on most people. The reception was “really positive and definitely got a good laugh. I think most people really got the humour in it really, really quickly.”

In the end, Laicini and Amito ended up $2,000 in debt but they hope to attract corporate sponsorships as the festival grows. “The intention is to make it bigger, to make it more exposed and to reach more people,” says Amito. Other goals for the upcoming festival are to have it run for two days during the last weekend of TIFF, to showcase more movies from different categories, and if time and resources allow, showcase a feature length film.

Even though Stiffed is a film festival for the rejected, they also had to stiff others as well which was difficult.

“We were fully aware of the fact that we probably had to turn away people from our film festival at the end of the day and what that meant for us,” says Laicini. He explained that being rejected from a film festival does not mean you’re a bad filmmaker or your movie wasn’t good, but is an issue of practicality.

Amito explains “the reality of the situation is that we can only screen ‘X’ number of films because of the time allocations that we have, and every film festival will have to make rejections. Although in our case it is exceptionally hard to reject because we are a film festival for the rejected.”

Ultimately, Amito says “the impact of Stiffed is just to send out that kind of energy, of just make it, make it, make it, go, go, go, whether you’re rejected or accepted, just keep going. That’s the impact that we hope to get and the more exposure that we can get as a film festival, the more I think we can get that message out there.”

“The film industry is a bitter, cold, cynical place, and it’s nice to have little moments of optimism,” says Laicini. “And that’s what I think Stiffed was. It was a moment of optimism.”

From Hamburg, with Love

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:10 +0000

By Lawrence Dushenski

In 1999, Rosie Dransfeld left behind the northern German city of Hamburg, where the skyline is littered with high church spires and neo-Renaissance architecture still influences the landscape. When she landed in Edmonton, she was met by urban sprawl and the magnificence of the concrete jungle in the far north of Canada.

Standing over six feet tall and with sharp features, Rosie is armed with an edgy personality, a rough German accent and an undeniable fearlessness. These attributes have allowed her to produce several documentary films to rave reviews.

: Rosie moved to Canada from Germany in 1999 – All photos courtesy ID: Productions Inc.

The change in scenery has had a significant influence on her work, and her use of a once popular style has catapulted her among the elite independent filmmakers in Canada. Cinéma vérité is rarely used today, but Rosie says it’s the best way to capture all of the elements necessary to tell a story.

“It is a style that I am best at. I think it is the best style for documentaries. This was a popular style of film in the ’60s in Canada, and is a very pure style,” says Rosie from her condo in trendy downtown Edmonton. “The essence is to document what is happening without narration.”

Part of what makes her style intriguing is that the characters tell the story, rather than having a narrator detailing the events on screen. It can make the films much more complicated, while capturing the raw emotion of the characters.

“If you succeed in doing this then it is really powerful. This may be one of the reasons that my film Broke won the Gemini award. People watch it and they realize it is all real, it is all real people. Many broadcasters shy away from this style,” she explains.

The film was one of Rosie’s most successful projects. Set at an inner-city pawnshop in Edmonton, the film follows owner David Woolfson through his journeys with the eclectic clientele that frequent his store. It highlights the lengths that people go to in a time of need, as they realize that almost everything in life has a price.

The film was shot entirely inside the pawn shop, and brought a largely unknown part of society to life. While it is rare to shoot an entire project in one location, the technique served her well. Broke won the Donald Brittain Award for social/political documentary at the Gemini Awards, and received critical
acclaim in the industry.

Scott Parker, who worked as the editor on Broke, first met Rosie when she was working on another project at his editing studio. They have now worked together on many projects and Parker says he has gained something truly valuable from his experiences with her.

“I have gotten a really good friend out of the deal, which is probably the best thing for me,” Parker explains. “It has been fantastic for me because I prefer to work alone. I don’t work with a director in the room and Rosie is very keen on that.”

Rosie gets to know the characters in her films and gains an understanding of the story that she is going to tell before she begins filming. This allows her to stand back on the set and let the characters tell the story. Her attention to detail originates from her work in Germany, and it has translated well into the Canadian film industry.

One of the first people that she worked with in Canada was Andrew Johnson, now the senior producer of documentaries for the CBC News Network. At the time, Johnson was working for Rough Cuts, a weekly CBC documentary series, and commissioned Rosie to create a project about Alberta and the perception of Albertans across Canada. The result was Crash Course Alberta, a film about what it means to be an Albertan.

[pullquote]“She has an eye for the odd, the quirky, the humourous but also the marginalized.”
- Andrew Johnson, CBC[/pullquote]

“She has her own perspective on things and a kind of fearless rigour to her view on social reality and issues,” explains Johnson. “She was someone who thought that things were pretty wonderful in Alberta, but she discovered that there was a lot of animosity between the East and West in Canada. She decided to explore it and she met a lot of interesting people. She did it with humour, but with her unique point of view.”

Beaver Man, the first documentary Rosie made with her production company, ID: Productions Inc. was also bought by Johnson.

“It was another film of her understanding Canada,” he says. “It was about a guy who was obsessed with beavers, and it was about beaver culture, the animal in Canadian culture. This man tried to highlight the beaver in his life.” It is this type of project that Rosie was passionate about, as the concept of such an infatuation with an animal from an outsider’s perspective captured her attention.

As an immigrant, Rosie’s view of Canadian culture is reflected in her films. “It was really that unique perspective and approach that she brings to things,” Johnson says. “You get a fresh look at somebody … she is from Germany and brings that perspective with her. It is a fresh look, a fresh viewpoint on things that we may take for granted here.”

“There is a fearlessness to her. That whatever situation she goes into, she is not afraid to ask questions that maybe Canadians are too polite to ask,” Johnson says. “She has an eye for the odd, the quirky, the humourous, but also the marginalized.”

: Rosie Dransfeld and David Woolfson in his Edmonton pawnshop

Jerry McIntosh, who now manages the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, met Rosie at a film festival in Banff, Alberta. She can be intimidating to some, as she towers over most of her peers and has a sharp edge, but she made an immediate impact on Jerry.

“I was impressed with her. She has a very strong personality and you always know when she is in the room.”

But as others have discovered with Rosie, McIntosh found there is depth behind her rigid exterior.

“Because of her particular perspective, she finds a quirky side in her characters. It is amusing, entertaining and very fresh,” he says. “I am accustomed to working with Canadian filmmakers who are perhaps a bit more purist about our culture – and she’s not. That is very refreshing.”

Rosie’s movies sometimes shock people, but that is often the only way to get a point across when dealing with such sensitive issues.

Sergio Olivares, the cinematographer for Broke and several other of her projects, embraces this approach. “You have to decide who you are going to be. Every time I pick up a camera, I decide to defend human rights. That is why I get along so well with Rosie,” he explains. “She has the ability as a producer to get in there and attach herself to all of these beautiful things, and that is extremely difficult to do in Canada. It works for humanity when she does these projects.”

The Rebirth of Mary Pickford

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:55:10 +0000

By Henji Milius

More than a century after her birth, Mary Pickford is back in the limelight. The TIFF Bell Lightbox has a display of memorabilia devoted to the starlet, as well as a mini-film festival.

Born in Toronto in 1892, Pickford made the move from stage to screen and was the first film actor to negotiate a million dollar contract with a studio. She earned a lifetime achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just three years before her death in 1979.

This first exhibit in the new Canadian Film Gallery at the Lightbox showcases 300 items ranging from a white cotton dress to personalized cutlery all donated from the private collection of a Mississauga film fan on a mission to keep Pickford’s memory alive.

“I want the public to know that she was one of us,” says Rob Brooks, the collection’s owner and president of Bloo & Wite Media Inc., a digital media consulting company. The exhibit opened January 13 and by mid-April nearly 10,000 visitors had viewed the display. Sylvia Frank, director and curator of the reference library at the Lightbox, is expecting interest to continue right up until the close in July. A retrospective of Pickford’s films is also playing until then.

Sweetheart, a musical tribute to Pickford, ran for 17 days in February at the Spadina Museum in Toronto. Written in 1998, and directed by Mimi Mekler, the musical performance was a recreation of Pickford’s tumultuous love life with her three husbands as well as her ambitious career. Composer Dean Burry says the “music is there to tell how she is feeling”.

Mary Pickford in a signed picture - Photo by Henji Milius

Known as “Canada’s sweetheart”, Pickford performed in 193 films from 1909 to 1933. According to Hugh Munro Neele, curator at the Mary Pickford Library at the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education, “she was able to control her contracts very carefully. She worked with her mother in that respect. Nobody handed those things to her.”

In 1919, Pickford founded a distribution company called United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. The company would serve filmmakers and not the studios, according to Neel’s profile of Pickford on the institute’s website.

Mary Pickford Weekend will be held May 14 and 15 at the TIFF Lightbox and will include a tour of the exhibition and a special screening of My Best Girl (1927), Pickford’s last silent film.

The Underground Cinema

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:54 +0000

By Emily Innes

If you can follow the signs and the arrows, leading through a building in the midst of construction to the Toronto Underground Cinema, it’s almost like you’ve landed in the Alice in Wonderland of theatres.

: Toronto’s Underground Cinema – Photo by Alisha Parchment

The first step is to get a ticket from Charlie Lawton, who smiles while saying “I hope you enjoy the show.”

A walk down the red carpeted stairs brings you to Nigel Agnew who takes the tiny ticket, rips it in half and drops one even tinier fragment into a giant popcorn bowl.

It’s a kaleidoscope of sights: posters spanning all genres and decades line the walls, a robot made of tinfoil stands beside a soda machine, and octopus legs climb out of the wall above the washrooms. Alex Woodside mans the popcorn machine, surrounded by classic glass coke bottles and Batman figurines.

No need to rush for a seat: there are 700 to choose from.

By the time you get to that seat, you have already soaked up the atmosphere and met the three guys that made the Underground a reality. Almost a year ago, they began managing the Toronto Underground Cinema, aiming to recapture the movie watching experience of the past.

Morgan White recognized the unique qualities of “the guys” and their movie theatre before it even opened and began filming a web series about their journey. “They’re crazy,” says White. “I think they’re just normal guys doing something that they are passionate about and that’s what makes them interesting. They really genuinely care about you coming to this movie theatre and enjoying yourself.”

White has gathered so much material that he is currently making a full-length feature film about the Toronto Underground Cinema and he expects a September 2011 completion date.

Last May, Agnew, Lawton, and Woodside began running the Toronto Underground Cinema on Spadina Avenue close to Queen. The basement space was originally a Chinese cinema called Golden Harvest for five years in the eighties. Years later, it had a brief nine-month stint as the Golden Classic, which screened Asian kung fu classics.

Agnew worked at the Bloor Cinema before getting involved with the Underground. He started in concessions the day he got hired and climbed to manager. Agnew says he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do something he is passionate about. “It was going to be a good gig. It’s doing what you love,” he says. Woodside was also working at the Bloor Cinema and Lawton was an independent filmmaker.

Lawton says even though the space had been vacant for 15 years, there wasn’t much they had to do to get the old theatre up and running. “It looks pretty much exactly how it looked back then, both as the Golden Classic and the Golden Harvest,” says Lawton. “All we really did was put up posters, we dusted and cleaned, we painted the doors red, and we painted the snack bar black and red. That’s literally it.” The theatre has more modern projectors but they still require manual labour and there is still a big red curtain that slowly draws open at the start of the show – around 7.p.m.

The Toronto Underground Cinema screens a variety of movies selected by listening “to what people want to see, films we want to show, films we think will bring in an audience – it really depends on the type of movie,” says Lawton.

Lawton admits there is a bit of a preferred genre. “Horror and cult films are our bread and butter,” says Lawton. “We program that more than anything else.”

They have shown movies such as Freaks, a 1932 Tod Browning movie about a trapeze performer trying to murder a little person, and last summer’s blockbuster Iron Man 2. The theatre also runs “cinema on demand” – requests will be screened for 25 or more guests. “We are the only cinema in Toronto doing this,” says Lawton.

[pullquote]“When you are coming down here you are getting a real film geek atmosphere.”
- Nigel Agnew, co-manager[/pullquote]

The Underground space is continually being redefined to suit movie events, music concerts, or comedy shows. Filmmakers have come for Q&A sessions after screening of their movies. Adam West, who played Batman in the 1960s TV show, talked to the crowd after a screening of Batman 66. He “was a lot of fun,” says Nigel. “We sold out that night.”

Independent filmmaker Chris Green screened his movie Zombie Werewolves Attack at the Underground to what Green describes as a great audience.

“The audience enjoyed the film and they had some questions for us about how long it took to make the film and what went into it,” says Green.

“One guy in the audience even asked one of the actors to repeat a line from the movie. He’s got a new catch phrase.” Green suggests other independent filmmakers talk to the guys at the Underground. “They helped me out a lot,” he says.

The theatre is a space to truly appreciate the beauty and magic of films. “It’s a fun place to come watch a movie,” says White. “Because the guys that run it love movies and they want you to love the movies that they love. And that’s kind of the point. They are trying to show films that they love and show them in the way they are supposed to be seen – on the big screen.”

Agnew says that the theatre usually attracts audiences that match their passion for films. “When you are coming down here you are getting a real film geek atmosphere,” says Agnew. “You can come down and after most screenings there is usually a few people that hang around and talk at length about the merits of the Super Mario Bros. movie,” says Agnew.

One evening the theatre played Freaks and when it came to an end, moviegoer Cory Arsenault sat up on top of his chair, turned to his friends and began discussing how bizarre the movie had been.

“It’s that reaction of the audience, hearing everyone laugh or enjoy the film, that’s why we do this,” says Lawton “Seeing a film with a good crowd makes a film a thousand times better.”

All in all, the managers are pleased so far. “Considering we are not even a year in, we are doing really well,” says Agnew. “Obviously things like this take time. I think that the community support has been overwhelming, and we really have a dedicated fan base who really loves what we are doing, so I think it can only get better from here.”

Underground Cinema managers Nigel Agnew, Alex Woodside, and Charlie Lawton - Photo by Alisha Parchment

Arsenault, who has been coming here since opening night, says he likes the relaxed atmosphere the large size of the theatre and the repertoire. “I like watching the older style,” says Arsenault. He says he really enjoyed Batman 66, especially when Adam West repeated his iconic dance.

But not everything is rosy at the Underground. There’s still the treasure hunt to find it – literally in a basement at the back of a building under construction. “We’re kind of hard to find, we don’t have a lot of signage presence on the street because of the building we’re in,” says Lawton.

Another difficulty is obtaining second run movies. This content goes to the rep theatres when the larger theatres are done with them. “The big boys pay a much larger premium to the distributors, they can pretty much keep them as long as they want,” he says. Box office hits and Oscar contenders tend to be held longer.

If someone is interested in undertaking a similar project they should be really dedicated to the project, the managers say. “Someone else trying to open up an independent movie theatre in Toronto? I’d say don’t bother,” jokes Agnew. Realistically, he says it requires a lot of passion and a desire to give people a good time.

Nonetheless, the managers have been happy about how things have been going and are looking forward to what will come. They are excited to have more events and continue to come up with new ways of using the space. Agnew would like to get big film festivals in the space and “more childhood heroes come down and chat about their work and show something the public is really going to like and remember.”

Lawton reflects on the year in a fond way. “I thought it’s been a really great year, it’s kind of hard to imagine it’s only been open for a year so far,” he says. “I’m really excited to see what happens next.”

The Rising of Sun News Network

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:54 +0000

By Alisha Parchment

Standing in front of a microphone at a press conference in Toronto almost a year ago, wearing co-ordinating crisp suits and ties, stands Pierre Karl Péladeau, chief executive of Quebecor Media Inc., and Kory Teneycke, Quebecor’s vice-president of development. Amidst the flashing lights and anticipation that filled the room, Quebecor revealed its newest project – the Sun News Network.

Cue the well-oiled media frenzy machine.

Launching this April, the network directly competes with CBC’s News Network and the CTV News Channel becoming Canada’s third 24-hour English-language cable news channel.

The plan, according to a press release from Péladeau, is to follow a “hard news, straight talk” formula, one that is tried and tested in the French-language media.

Before the channel’s name was even on the lips of Canadians, Quebecor needed approval from the CRTC. Last June, an application was made for a three-year, Category 1 Specialty TV licence which would have required cable and satellite carriers to include the channel. The CRTC denied the request.

In the end, Quebecor withdrew their previous attempts, and Sun News Network was granted a five-year Category 2 specialty channel license, meaning it would have to begin bargaining with satellite and cable carriers for a spot on their line-up. According to the regulations of the CRTC, Canadians must now subscribe to Sun News Network if they want to tune in.

“It’s new but in a way it is a re-packaged version of something that is old,” says Ian Morrison, spokesperson for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, self-described watchdogs for Canadian programming. He is referring to Toronto 1 (now Sun TV) Quebecor’s first attempt at a similar channel that failed to gain momentum. So Quebecor is not starting from scratch. Morrison estimates, “In the last five years, they’ve actually lost about $50 million dollars keeping [the channel] alive.”

Dubbed “Fox News North” by some who view it as a clone of the U.S.-based Fox News, critics question its credibility. “Fox News is their model. I don’t think Canadians on-air can replicate that kind of idiocy though,” suggests Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick in an email to Fine Cut. “I don’t think Canada is the kind of country that is attracted to the simpleton’s view. So I don’t know that it will attract many viewers. Canadians want more credible information, not less.”

Currently, the Sun News Network is under Teneycke’s leadership. He is the former spokesperson for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. According to the Globe and Mail, Teneycke is known for his tough-guy political attitude and played a pivotal role in the Conservative victory over former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion’s carbon-tax initiative.

International activist organization, Avaaz, began its own crusade against the upcoming network with an online petition titled “Stop Fox News North” last fall. It claimed Harper would be using Sun News Network to “push American-style hate media onto [Canadian] airwaves” and would be “funded with money from our cable TV fees.”

The news of these accusations spread, garnering the petition more than 80,000 signatures, 21,000 of which Avaaz delivered to the CRTC. Even literary giant Margaret Atwood added her name, but said in an email to the Globe and Mail she signed the petition in protest of Harper’s style of government and not as an objection to Sun News Network.

Shortly after Avaaz’s request for a police investigation in September of last year, Teneycke unexpectedly resigned from his position, saying his past involvement with the Harper government left an unfavourable impression. However, in January 2011, Teneycke resumed his position.

[pullquote]“It will represent grumpy old men. I think we hear from them all the time. They never shut up.”
- Heather Mallick, Toronto Star columist [/pullquote]

Poised to be one of the Sun News Network’s most promising additions is conservative commentator and author, Ezra Levant. He is set up to host his own news analysis show. Not expecting that competition will be an issue, it is Levant’s belief that, “Canadians don’t really watch the two channels that they have been given – CBC News Network and CTV News.” He is looking forward to providing an alternative news source.

“I’m excited to talk to Canadians every single day about news in a way that I don’t think they have heard from before – breaking open the news cartel right now on some issues where only one point of view is allowed.”

For some, the Sun News Network may seem to balance Canada’s news, answering a silent call for a more conservative-leaning take on our society. “It is their hype that somehow is making them different,” says Morrison.

But what will Canadians be seeing when they watch Sun News Network? According to Levant, the network will emulate the Sun chain of tabloid newspapers owned by Quebecor. “If you want a feeling of what Sun TV is going to look like, just pick up the Toronto Sun. It is going to be a fun, peppy antidote to the bland mainstream consensus,” he says.

“Some people have criticized the very idea of another voice,” says Levant. “There is such a consensus approach to issues of the day. It is a politically correct liberal consensus and once in a while the consensus is right - but quite often it’s not, and Canadians don’t have a place to go for the other point of view.”

Others aren’t as keen, considering what the channel might embody. “It will represent grumpy old men,” says Mallick. “I think we hear from them all the time. They never shut up. They’re in their basements typing angry anonymous comments to the CBC. Now they’ll have their own channel!”

On the other hand, some love a little friendly competition. “We welcome Sun TV to the marketplace; competition is good for everyone, especially viewers,” says Wendy Freeman, CTV News president in an email to Fine Cut.

Only time can tell what the network will bring to the table. In the meantime, Levant has his own prediction. “I think we are going to be the most talked about news channel in the country.”

The Man Above

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:54 +0000

By Kelly Schweitzer

: Projectionist Andy Erne at Toronto’s Royal Theatre – Photo by Kelly Schweitzer

That smell is unmistakable. The second you heave open the movie theatre door, you’re guaranteed to be greeted by the scent of hot, buttery popcorn wafting over you. Movie posters are sure to be lining the walls and smiling faces will be standing behind booths, ready to dole out tickets.

Whether you attend a show at an independently owned theatre or a corporate chain, the experience is largely the same and has been for decades. But the one thing that has truly evolved, and inconspicuously, is the role of the projectionist – the person whose job is to ensure you see the movie you paid for.

“A real projectionist is like the Wizard of Oz,” says Andy Erne, projectionist for The Royal Cinema in Toronto. “If you do it well, no one ever draws the curtain. I am paid to be invisible. The only way people know I’m here is if something screws up.”

Early film projectionists were required by provincial governments to be licensed and the profession mandated a set of specific skills and training. Now, more than a hundred years later, the role of the projectionist requires little training and can be performed by regular theatre staff. While there are fundamental elements of the position that still remain, a lot has changed over the past century.

John Tutt, projectionist, film programmer and owner of the Princess Cinema and the Princess Twin in Waterloo, Ont. says the licensing system was introduced when 35mm film was made of nitrate and was volatile.

“Theatres burned down and projectionists got injured with this film that would sometimes ignite in the projection booth with all the hot lamps and carbon arcs,” says Tutt.

The licensing system was established both for safety reasons and for quality control. “It was a way to make sure that films were presented in a standard way and weren’t presented in a shoddy manner,” he says.

Peter Henderson, a projectionist at The Bookshelf Cinema in Guelph, Ont. says becoming a licensed projectionist required 700 hours of an apprenticeship followed by an almost three-hour written exam and a practical exam with a projector in which you had to thread up and demonstrate operating knowledge for the equipment.

You also had to be at least 18 years old, adds Erne, since projectionists would be running restricted movies. Plus, you had to be physically fit and have good eyesight.

In 1995, the government abolished the provincial licensing system for projectionists, deeming it unnecessary, Tutt says.

Erne says he thinks that getting rid of the licensing system diminished the quality of projectionists. “Some people just love this, and those are the guys who make good projectionists. At multiplexes you don’t have people who care about what they do. At every multiplex you’ll usually find one person who cares and he will have been there longer. And with him, he’ll have what we call “threaders” working – people who just thread the movie but also work downstairs. And they don’t know much about it; they just know how to put the film in and how to thread up and then if something goes wrong, a lot of them don’t know what to do.”

Henderson says there were two things that had to happen for the advent of the multiplex to occur: the xenon bulb replacing the carbon arcs and the platter system.

Before the 1980s, when xenon became the standard, carbon arc was used to project the images from the lamp house to the screen.

Two carbon rods sat facing each other in the lamp house and an electrical current would jump across to form a light which a mirror would catch and throw through the projector onto the screen. The problem was that the carbon rods only lasted roughly 20 minutes before they burned down and would have to be replaced.

The length of time it took for the rods to burn down was in sync with the length of time it took for one reel to end, as each reel of film equals about 20 minutes.

“That’s why there were two projectors in every movie theatre,” says Henderson, “because you’d go back and forth alternating with your 20 minute reels.” With the reel-to-reel system, or changeover system, one reel is played on one projector while a second is being set up.

“In the audience you didn’t notice a thing, you’d just think you were watching a 90 minute feature,” Tutt says. “But in the booth it was quite a busy place because the projectionist was adjusting his carbon arc lamps, he was changing projectors, he was reloading reels every 20 minutes. And I believe way back when, there would even be two projectionists in a busy theatre.”

When xenon replaced carbon arc it alleviated the necessity to continually change the carbon rods as a bulb runs for about 2,000 hours.

Xenon brought its own problems however. Tutt says the colouring a xenon bulb reflects on-screen isn’t as good as the carbon arc’s, and it is sometimes argued as tending to the purple spectrum. Carbon arc, on the other hand, was the closest thing to pure sunlight, and so produced perfectly balanced light.

With the longevity of xenon, projectionists can splice reels together and eliminate the necessity for multiple changeovers. And with the platter system, before patrons even enter the theatre the projectionist will have spliced the reels together into one continuous reel so the film plays from beginning to end.

: 35mm film still feeds through this projector at The Royal Cinema in Toronto – Photo by Kelly Schweitzer

This is done by using a device called a splicer and a special kind of tape specifically intended for film. The two ends of each reel of film are first placed on the splicer and the splicing tape is stretched across to connect the ends. A perforator is then pushed down over the film to puncture the tape through the sprocket holes which are necessary for the film to run smoothly through the projector.

While the reels are mounted on the projector in the changeover system, the platter system consists of three large round discs, or platforms, that are stacked horizontally and separate from the projector. The movie reel is placed on one platter and the film threads out of the centre of the reel and along a set of rollers to the projector. It then feeds through the projector and comes back on another series of rollers and onto an empty platter, making one big loop. It is this system that allows one projectionist to operate several different screens.

While the platter system makes things a little easier during film projection, some independent theatres, such as The Royal, continue to use the changeover system. One reason for this is that most booths don’t have room for a platter, says Erne.

And though a platter system can run a film continuously without having to do a changeover, it could take up to an hour and a half to splice together each reel – time that in Erne’s opinion is often a waste. Many independent theatres will only run a film for two or three days, so projectionists would have to break it down again after limited use.

And of course, technology is always progressing. Theatres are gradually making the change from film to digital projection, but not even all mainstream theatres have adopted the new technology. While Cineplex Entertainment’s Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto has installed the digital cinema projection system, Cineplex’s IMAX continues to use film prints.

“I think it was automation over the years that’s changed the job a lot,” Tutt says. Cue spots started being put on the film in order to cue the theatre lights to turn on, the screen curtains to open, and music to come on after the film.

He says the projectionist’s job became more of a technical role in making sure everything worked properly.

“You want all this technology to work properly and that’s where the expertise changed and I think projectionists had to become knowledgeable in a different area. And now today it’s just a cornucopia of changes,” says Tutt.

Tutt says that with technology moving forward and digital projection becoming more popular, any consumer has the skills needed. It’s akin to knowing how to properly load a Blu-ray and adjust it so that it looks proportioned on the screen.

“It’s that level of skill that a projectionist has now-a-days, except they do it in a bigger, more public
environment.”

Route to the Land of Dreams

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:54 +0000

By Samina Esha



: Maya Noel – Photo courtesy Rishab Chheda

Red paint, mirrors, and the echoing sound of voices creates a calming illusion of mysticism through which Maya could see her own reflection staring back at her. She looks straight into the camera and starts her audition for the Bollywood acting program.

“I have always wanted to be one thing, a Bollywood actor. When I first heard about the Bollywood acting program in Canada I just had this strong gut feeling. I knew this was it,” says Maya Noel, a 19-year-old Indo-Canadian actor who is currently living in Mumbai, India in pursuit of her lifelong dream to be in Bollywood.

Located in Mississauga, the Canadian Institute of Management and Technology College (CIMT) has opened the first government-backed Bollywood acting program in North America.

Canada has always been a melting pot for many cultures and experiences. With the South-Asian community exceeding two million, Canada is a hot spot for the Bollywood industry. According to Toronto film commissioner Peter Finestone, in 2010 alone the Hindi movie industry has brought in more than $850 million in to the Canadian economy.

With divine beauty, Indian diaspora, and state of the art facilities, Canada is the second home for the Indian film industry. “We are known as the Hollywood North, let us make Canada Bollywood west,” says Lucky Sanda, a former child actor in Bollywood, and now program director, Bollywood acting program at the CIMT.

The program started in September 2010 with only 11 students ranging in age from eight to 48. The course costs approximately $9,000, or $13,000 for international students, plus an estimated $500 for books.

“We decided to start this new venture because we saw this as a need … no one has been doing this. What we saw was kind of a positive market here. What we wanted to propose is a similar system as that which is entrenched in the culture in Mumbai. We wanted the same thing here and we took a chance,” says Vivek Pandey, director of academics at CIMT College.

Bhupendra Mane came to Canada as an international student in 2007 to study biotechnology at Centennial College. However, his passion for acting led him to the Bollywood acting program. “I was looking for any kind of training in the field. I had done a lot of research and searched for months before I finally heard about the program. Bollywood is coming to the north and I wanted to take advantage of that as I was already in Canada,” says Mane.

With a new semester starting in September 2011, the school hopes to keep a low profile to prioritize the quality of work. “It is an initial stage. It has only been a year. It is an accelerated and evolving program,” says Pandey.

After finishing the program, students have the option of going to India or staying in Canada and pursuing their career. “If you do not feel like leaving the comfort of your home and go to Mumbai then there are also opportunities here,” says Sanda.

For Mane the choice to stay in Canada was easy. As he finishes his degree in biotechnology, he is also working towards his dream of acting. Over the years, Mane has appeared in many Bollywood movies that have been shot in Toronto.

“There is more competition in India. Over 100 people would wait in line to audition for the same character. But here the competition is less. Auditions are easier, and there is a chance for my talent to be recognized. So, if I get approached to work in India I will go there but I will not go there to find work,” Mane says.

Aside from being a student, Mane is currently working as a quality control specialist along with being a model and actor. He hopes to produce his own work in the future.“Acting is my passion whether it is in Hollywood, Bollywood, or the Canadian film industry. I have worked with different Canadian and Bollywood productions, which helps to get a solid resume.” Mane says.

For Noel, moving to India to act in the Bollywood industry was an easy choice. “There is a limit to what you can do in Canada in terms of going into the Bollywood industry. I just wanted to go where everything was happening and where I could grow,” says Noel.

: Canadian Natalie Di Luccio at the Taj Mahal – Courtesy Natalie Di Luccio

Noel grew up in Etobicoke and had a full scholarship to attend the University of Guelph for her undergraduate degree in drama before she moved to India. She also hopes to pursue fashion as well as acting.

“You can prepare yourself as much as you want to but when it comes to applying yourself, you have to go where the heart of the industry is which is India. However, the Bollywood acting program prepares you for the intensity of this industry,” says Noel.

The intensive program is held six days a week for roughly five hours. If at the end of it students want to try their luck in the birthplace of Bollywood, they can repeat the course numerous times for free at India’s Kishore Namit Kapoor’s Acting Institute, which is affiliated with the CIMT program. At age 60, Kishore Namit Kapoor is a well-known figure in the Bollywood film industry with many famous actors emerging from his academy. He is also a seasonal instructor at the Bollywood acting program in Toronto.

“I did the course again in Mumbai for about four months. That was different. In Mumbai, the students and faculty are directly from the industry. So, you get to meet people from the related field,” Noel says.

Classes such as music, dance, and yoga/relaxation are part of a holistic curriculum. “The yoga class is there to relax the students so that they can concentrate on their acting. Music opens your vocal cords. These are techniques to help them with their diction, rhythm, and to modulate emotion,” Sanda says.

He says the international Bollywood industry is constantly seeking trained professionals and his program can supply the talent. “Last year many Canadian and Bollywood casting directors had contacted us. It is all about contacts and that is what we provide them,” Sanda explains. “We are here to teach. We can polish the talent of students who are already talented individuals and for the other students we can teach them the craft and mechanism of acting.”

An Interview with a Sex Mogul

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:54 +0000

: Porn TV pioneer Anne-Marie Losique poses for a photoshoot – Photo courtesy IDI Productions

By Jordan Whelan

On camera and on paper, Anne-Marie Losique would appear to be “that girl” – a free spirited, vivacious vixen with brewing confidence and notions of love, romance and sexuality. And with an arsenal of business maneuvers, The Montreal Mirror has dubbed her a “sex mogul.”

The daughter of Serge Losique, the president and founder of the Montreal Film Festival, Anne-Marie Losique may just have the golden touch encoded into her DNA.

With a propensity for seductive provocation, exceptional self-awareness, and an infectious giggle, Losique stormed the entertainment industry in Quebec as the host of Box-Office, a cinema television magazine. She’s travelled the world to interview industry personnel from porn stars to Hollywood moguls.

Her most notorious, and “Googleworthy” interview took place in 2004, on the lap of an inebriated Ben Affleck. Instead of promoting his upcoming film, Jersey Girl, Affleck groped Losique for nearly five minutes while spieling quotes such as “they would like it better if you did the show topless”, “should we do a Janet Jackson thing?”, and “are you wearing your nipple ring?”

Losique is nearly speechless and she coos and giggles through Affleck’s rant, which at one point includes a satire on individuals suffering from cerebral palsy.

[pullquote]“We all have multiple layers to our personalities, I think some people are of the impression that I go home and have gang bangs.”
-Anne-Marie Losique[/pullquote]

Today she is a far cry from a run-of-the-mill VJ. She has become an entertainment industry heavyweight in a relatively short period of time, producing and artfully controlling a contentious niche market. It is a Thursday afternoon when AML (her stage name) shares her story over the phone from the headquarters of her highly successful production company, Image Diffusion International.

It seems like many, I have erred in my preconceptions of a grandiose Losique primped and pampered from sunrise to set. She sounds ill and remarks she’s “looking like shit, ” makeup-less, in jogging pants and with dirty hair – not the image you find in a quick Google search. Nearly every shot on the web shows a bikini-clad and buxom Losique.

“We all have multiple layers to our personalities, I think some people are of the impression that I go home and have gang bangs,” says Losique. “I take my work very seriously, but I do not take myself very seriously.”

Across the board, Losique is many pieces in a shifting puzzle. She interjects her “bimbo” persona when it is advantageous to her productions, but enjoys the credibility that her curriculum vitae bring.

“This is the way I protect myself, I don’t want to break the fantasy, but at the end of the day if I wanted to clear all the talk I could,” says Losique.

The truth is, remove the AML brand and what you’re left with is a business model that would likely fail. In October of last year, Image Diffusion took its most monumental risk yet, launching a French-language adult entertainment channel named Vanessa TV. Dubbed “porn TV” by the premier media outlets, the channel features many genres such as reality shows, cooking shows and documentaries.

The channel was approved on March 6, 2009 by the CRTC. The decision lists that Vanessa TV will be “devoted to the themes of charm, sensuality, eroticism, and sexuality and might also include documentaries, news and magazines covering the industries that exploit these themes and the personalities that revolve around them.” As per standard CRTC agreements the channel must broadcast at least 20 per cent Canadian content.

But Vanessa TV must battle the reality of a saturated adult entertainment market. Tandy Yull, senior manager of English-language television at the CRTC confirmed via an email interview that there are six other adult channels including Red Hot TV, and the powerhouse duo of Hustler TV and Penthouse TV.

Losique on set - Photo courtesy IDI Productions

Losique and co. believe a strong local identity will be what helps Vanessa TV thrive in the fickle television market.

“I’m going to aim close to 80 per cent because we bought Playboy before but what we found is that people want local content,” Losique says.

As with any new venture, there will be hurdles. First and foremost, there are hang-ups about sex and adult entertainment in general. The CRTC has already reported 62 complaints with the service, but according to Image Diffusion’s co-president Marc Trudeau, that’s “next to nothing” given the population of Canada.

“What I have discovered about sex is that you really go back to deep insecurities with people. Come on, it’s just sex,” says Losique.

Trudeau explains the company’s dispute with Shaw cable, which decided not to partner with Vanessa TV.

“It is really a pity to see that a Canadian network like Shaw broadcasts plenty of American channels and refuses a Canadian channel with Canadian content,” says Trudeau.

Representatives from Shaw could not be reached for comment.

Bell Canada, a direct competitor with Shaw has broadcasted the channel since October 2010 at a monthly rate of $15.23. Marie-Eve Francoeur, the associate director of media relations would not give subscriber numbers for competitive reasons.

“We continue to make programming choices to match consumer demand,” says Francoeur.

So the oldest business in the world has demand – it is hardly groundbreaking. But with free access on the internet and video-on-demand services tailored exactly to consumer desires, Vanessa TV requires strong entertainment value. If they stick too close to pure pornography, viewers may take their $15.23 and opt for a T-bone steak.

Vanessa TV will launch an English-language version in fall of this year, with its own separate license. It will carry the same blend of reality shows, cooking segments and documentaries, followed by pornography as the sun sets. Trudeau says the French network will be producing more than 320 hours of content by the end of the year and that they aim to follow suit with the English version.

Despite growing pains and the channel’s untested waters, Losique is confident that they have found their stride and has plans to export into French speaking countries.

“I want to push the envelope and also show there is always another side to sex,” says Losique.

It is unknown if the old adage “sex sells” will ring true as Vanessa TV celebrates its one year anniversary in October and gears up for the English launch in the fall. Either way, don’t expect Anne Marie Losique, the persona, to reinvent herself for her golden years.

“In five years, I am out of here, hopefully on a beach somewhere,” laughs Losique. Perhaps it seems, “that girl” is eager to become “that woman.”

Return To The Darkroom

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:53 +0000

By Katie O’Connor

The smell of chemicals hangs heavily in the air. A single light bulb casts eerie shadows on the students’ faces as they tear open bags of fixer and developer and stir them carefully into water using wooden spoons. “I can’t wait to see how this turns out,” gushes Natalie, a twenty-something girl sporting think horn rimmed glasses, as she clutches a reel of film.

It’s a gorgeous Sunday morning in February and a small group of students have gathered in a dimly lit darkroom at the offices of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, a co-op dedicated to the preservation of film. The students are preparing to hand process celluloid film they shot the day before using a Bolex.

There is a palpable excitement in the air and its this feeling that brings the group out early on a Sunday morning to learn something that has been called a dying medium, an archaic art. They haven’t seen what their footage looks like yet. The mystery adds to the anticipation.

Digital purists make the argument that when using digital, you see the results instantly. With film, especially for those new to it, questions of exposure, focus, lighting and angle aren’t answered until the film has been processed.

The results could be brilliant or dismal.

“The moment in the darkroom when the image starts to come is magic,” said Toronto-based filmmaker Phil Hoffman. “I don’t get that in digital. That is a thrill, an epiphany that I look for in making films. That’s why I don’t use a script, and I depend on the process and image to tell me things.”

[pullquote]“The moment in the darkroom when the image starts to come is magic.”
- Phil Hoffman, filmmaker[/pullquote]

Hoffman teaches production in the film department at York University in Toronto. Students spend their first year of the program shooting strictly on film. He has watched people who grew up on a steady diet of digital discover the world of analogue.

“What hooks them into film is the thrill of seeing what was in their head, and how it turns out,” he said. “It sometimes doesn’t work out, or it can work magically. That’s the magic of film that digital does not express in the same way.”

Hoffman believes that physical processes affect mental processes, and that in using film, the subconscious of the filmmaker will somehow become connected with the footage. “Things will start to happen that you don’t expect and those things are energetically connected with the project you need to make,” he said. “There is something different about that process that actually affects the creative process, that’s why I hold onto it.”

Digital allows an endless number of takes from various angles can be shot until the scene is just right. With film, there is a certain number of feet on a reel, limits the number of shots and takes that are possible creating a sense of unpredictability.

But some filmmakers see these limitations as a good thing. Tracy German, a Toronto-based filmmaker, has made a variety of short films and documentaries over her 14-year career, many of which were shot on film. “Limitations yield intensity,” she says. Being able to shoot hours and hours of footage takes away the preciousness of film. In having a limited amount of footage and space, filmmakers are forced to think about the shots that they are taking and what they need to form a visual narrative. “It’s about the process of being willing to go into the medium and trying to understand what you have shot and the form within it,” she says.

Chemicals to develop film - Photo by Mark Zanin

German finds that with digital, there is always the need for more. “The problem with more footage is you need more hard drive space, more high tech equipment. It’s a more more more system and nothing is good enough at a certain point.”

Coral Aiken is the community outreach co-ordinator for the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. She teaches community workshops to kids where they use super 8 cameras to make movies. The idea is to get them used to thinking about what shots they need to take, rather than shooting everything in sight.

“If you shoot on video you can take this endless amount of footage, and when you get into the editing room it’s sort of overwhelming,” she says. “The idea of these limitations forces you to prepare a lot more and limit what you shoot.”

Shooting with film also allows filmmakers to have a physical connection with their work. With digital, the footage is shot, transferred to a hard drive, and then manipulated with buttons. Until a DVD is created, there is nothing tangible. With film, a filmmaker can physically hold their work in their hands.

They hand crank the camera to power it, use their fingers to process the images and then project the finished product, listening to the whirring of the projector as the images they so painstakingly created appear on screen.

Aiken, who is a trained dancer and choreographer, was drawn to film because of this aspect. “The physicality is really important to me,” she says. “Super 8 is on these little plastic reels, and you can just have your movie in your hand and its very tangible and physical.”

For German, there is a sense of empowerment in working with film. After graduating from film school, German spent several years in the film industry until she became pregnant with her son. As a woman and mother, she began to feel invisible to the working world. She fought this feeling by continuing to make films using a do-it-yourself approach, where she shot, edited and processed everything herself.

“Filmmaking can be a big industrial complex where you don’t have very much control over it at all. [Working with film] takes it back down to its simplest and most accessible roots. You do have absolute control over it and you can imbue the medium with your own sensibility, your own quirky aesthetic and show that back to the world.”

There is a new generation of artists turning to analogue technologies to make and show their work, to rediscover what digital is so desperately trying to replicate. “It’s all just trying to re-create film, so why not learn a little about it and see what the big deal is,” Aiken says. “If people are super interested in looking at image quality, they are going to come back to film eventually or at least experiment with it.”

For Hoffman there will never be anything like film. “It has rich tones, it looks different. It has grain so it looks like an impressionist painting,” he says. In the age of Youtube, where anyone and everyone can shoot a movie, using film allows a filmmaker to stand out among the crowd, while gaining knowledge that enhances their craft.German sums it up perfectly. “You can do things quickly with the new technology, and edit something in a day, and that can be great, but overall it takes a long time to do a good film, and it takes a lot of work. You have to fall in love with something about it to keep you going for such a long period of time. You have to fall in love with it over and over again.”

Click here to find out how to process negative black and white film in your bathroom!

Shooting the Revolution

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:53 +0000

By Joseph Engelhardt

There has been a lot said about the DSLR revolution. Cameras like the Canon 5D Mark II and 7D, and Panasonic D7000 have made waves in the filmmaking industry. For the first time, filmmakers are now speaking in terms of thousands of dollars rather than tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their hands on a camera that will shoot high quality video.

“It’s democratized high-end filmmaking,” says Fred Konkin, manager of video sales at Vistek in Toronto.

For many, the revolution began with the announcement of the Canon 5D Mark II in September 2008, which promised full high-definition video in a product that was priced below $5,000. Soon, serious filmmakers began experimenting with what the 5D could do. Konkin says it wasn’t long before consumers began clamouring for the new cameras, eager to try out the latest new toys.

While it’s undeniable that this new wave of DSLR cameras are capable of shooting incredible video, for many there is a polarizing debate as to what the role of the DSLR should be in the industry, or if it should even be taken seriously.

: Fred Konkin with a Canon 7D in a Redrock rig – Photo by Joseph Engelhardt

Konkin is quick to acknowledge that while the DSLR is a valuable filmmaking tool, it does have limitations, perhaps most notably with audio quality.

“The audio quality of DSLR’s is poor at best,” he says.

Konkin says that while the initial hype of the DSLR is lagging, filmmakers are beginning to find niches where the cameras work best, such as filming close-up shots.

“Originally the swing was to throw away my video camera and do everything on DSLR, but now it’s swung back,” he says. “The video cameras are now used as the bases, doing wide angle shots, telephoto shots, and you’ve got continuous audio being recorded, and then you fill in the shots with the DSLRs.”

Christopher Huchenski, creative director at Vistek, agrees that while the initial trend of using a DSLR to shoot everything is coming to an end, they are still massively popular with filmmakers. “The fad will last another year, at least,” he predicts.

Both Huchenski and Konkin pointed to another valuable role that DSLRs have been able to fill for professional filmmakers. Due to their compact size and relative cheapness, Konkin observes that DSLRs are being used in places and situations where larger cameras either wouldn’t fit or were at risk of being damaged.

“You want to strap them all over a car and blow it up, and they don’t care because they’re so cheap,” he says. “And Rodney (Charters, director of photography for 24) did that, he had one car and must have had five to eight Canon 5Ds on it. From every angle I do one take. I get every shot I ever wanted to get and I don’t care if the cameras are destroyed.”

For independent filmmakers, DSLR cameras also offer great advantages in terms of cost. Jonathan Krimer, the president of the Toronto Filmmakers Association, says that DSLR cameras are giving independent filmmakers working on limited budget a huge advantage by substantially cutting the cost of the cameras themselves.

“You’re getting a film look for a very inexpensive price,” he says.

Krimer says that some of the technological advancements of the DSLR, such as control over depth of field, have made it particularly popular with filmmakers. “Before, everything was flat, so you have more control. You have the ability to tell the audience what to focus on,” he says.

While the DSLR camera does present filmmakers with a new, affordable alternative to more conventional means of shooting, it is not without opponents. Justin Oakey, a Toronto-based filmmaker who has produced short films using both DSLRs and more conventional cameras, feels that the availability of the DSLR camera to mass market consumers means it’s more difficult for filmmakers to establish themselves.

“People aren’t impressed when you make a film anymore, because anyone can do it now,” he says.

Oakey points to video-sharing sites like Vimeo and YouTube, which are now overloaded with videos shot on DSLRs that look professional but aren’t. He says this overload makes it hard for independent filmmakers to use these sites and get their work noticed. Having shot a film with a DSLR, Oakey also pointed to challenges he faced with the technology itself, including issues with file compression and frustrations when it came to editing the footage.

“It’s almost like the illusion of a really nice camera,” he says.

Oakey says that DSLRs – which are still primarily used for still photography – compress the images shot down to a level where the quality can be substandard.

Mark Tollefson, a filmmaking professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, is also a vocal critic of the DSLR’s popularity, citing its many technical limitations as a huge drawback.

“I would hardly say it’s a technical advancement when you’re taking a huge step backwards,” he says, making specific reference to the audio limitations of the DSLR. “There are lots of real cameras that are not much more expensive,” he says.

Tollefson also says that DSLRs simply can’t handle certain types of shots, most notably ones that involve lots of motion. “It’s a motion picture camera that doesn’t do motion.” Tollefson, who is also active in the Canadian film and television industry, notes that many broadcasters simply won’t accept high definition footage from a DSLR camera. He said these broadcasters have issues with the quality of HD footage that a DSLR produces.

“Most of the HD broadcasters are very touchy about what is HD,” he says.

One area where both the advocates and opponents of DSLR agree upon is that the cameras are by no means the be all and end all of what the future of filmmaking is, despite what consumers might believe.

Konkin notes that some of the large video camera companies such as Panasonic and Sony have already responded to the popularity of the DSLR by producing affordable, high quality video cameras.

Konkin specifically points to the Panasonic AF-100, which was released at the end of December, as a major challenger to the popularity of the DSLR.

“It’s more versatile and the results are outstanding,” he says, noting that perhaps one of the biggest strengths of the AF when compared to a DSLR is audio quality.

While it’s undeniable that the advent of the DSLR camera has changed the way filmmakers view cameras and filmmaking, it also seems that it is far from the revolutionary game-changer that fans of the camera forecasted when the Canon 5D first launched. With painfully apparent limitations, it seems highly unlikely that a DSLR camera will be shooting Hollywood blockbusters any time soon. Instead, the DSLR has found a niche as a utility camera and goes places filmmakers would never dream of putting a conventional one.

Because if your camera’s only worth a couple thousand dollars, why not blow it up to get the shot?

Cinema at your Fingertips

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:53 +0000

By Lindsay Tsuji

Big budget, green screen, Terminator-style explosions and special effects aren’t for everyone. That’s particularly true for filmmakers who simply don’t have the budget or manpower to make it happen.

Filmmakers and producers are often bogged down with rental fees for equipment, permits and paperwork. But lately, technology has been on their side. Handheld mobile devices could be just what these cinema enthusiasts need.

In January, Apple announced that more than 10 billion mobile applications have been downloaded by more than 160 million iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users worldwide. With over 350,000 different apps, people are discovering new ways to make life just a little bit easier. Who says it can’t be easier for artists, too?

Mobile apps can do a number of different things to help filmmakers create the film they’ve always wanted. Fine Cut checked out three that are already on the market.

First up is a storyboard app by Cinemek. Based in California, they are most well-known for producing the ‘G5’ 35 mm lens adaptor, an HD imaging device that allows for depth of field and field of view at 35mm. Cinemek launched the app in 2009 – it allows moviemakers to take pictures from their phone and create a storyboard on the road.

Photo courtesy of Cinema Inc.

Jonathan Houser, CEO of Cinemek, says his company saw an opportunity to make things a bit easier for filmmakers. “It allows you to play with your ideas so that you can get real time feedback on it,” Houser says.

As a seasoned cinematographer and former Seattle Film Institute professor, Houser says he saw his students struggling to convey their movie ideas on paper. The app can help you map out your film while you’re still in the inception stage, Houser explains.

“Before you start renting gear, before you start getting cameras, you can pre-visualize and think about your close-ups and think about your wide shots and play them back real time on your phone,” Houser says. “So you really get an idea of exactly how your film is going to look and then you’re educated a little bit more before you start production.”

For $20, Houser says it’s not the cheapest app out there but it can save you money in the long term.

Next on deck is an app from Moviola, a company that has been producing tools for filmmakers since the 1920s.

They released their Final Cut Pro Field Guide mobile app in March 2010. This $3.99 app tries to eliminate the uh-oh stages of editing. From a searchable listing of all Final Cut keyboard shortcuts to step-by-step instructions on how to troubleshoot audio sync problems, this app delves into the mechanics of editing with Final Cut software.

Randy Paskal, president at Moviola in Hollywood, California says this kind of technology allows filmmakers “to have the confidence to try new things while they’re right in the middle of action.”

The third app comes from film stalwart Kodak. Their depth of field calculator is available for a free download from the iTunes app store. It calculates the setting for a desired focus in a shot and can create different moods in film. The Kodak app lets you enter information like film format, F-stop, and focal length to calculate things like the near limit and far limit distances.

Nicole Phillips, director of web marketing for the Entertainment Imaging Division at Kodak, says this app allows people to use technology as they’ve always done but with more speed and efficiency. “It would just be easier than to have to look it up in a book or use one of those old-fashioned wheels to find out what the right numbers are for lighting or the distance from the character to the camera. The process requires the same discipline.”

[pullquote]“The mobile device is the most pervasive computer that we’ll probably ever see in the next couple decades. It’s just another way to engage the customers.”
- Ameet Shah, Five Mobile Inc.[/pullquote]

These three apps are different in focus, price and use, but what they do have in common is they’re trying to make it easier for filmmakers to make movies on the go. Whether you’re an established filmmaker or an aspiring indie moviemaker, you still want your idea to fully come to life on the big screen.

Ameet Shah is a managing partner of Five Mobile Inc. in Toronto. They’ve produced apps for Disney, Cineplex and Sony Pictures television. “At the end of the day, you gotta realize that the mobile device is the most pervasive computer that we’ll probably ever see in the next couple decades. It’s just another way to engage the customers,” says Shah.

“There are certainly people out there that are purists, but it depends on what your goal is. If you think of it as a business then you need to look at these things.” There have always been naysayers to technology that overreaches into the creative world, but Moviola’s Paskal says it allows for more free thinking.

“I think you’re also finding a lot more creativity becoming available as a result of these tools being around.”

Going Green Screen

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:53 +0000

By Sarah Horwath

It’s the industry’s dirty little secret, and no amount of subversion will make it go away.

That’s why the not-for-profit environmental media arts organization Planet in Focus is working to promote social and ecologically sustainable production practices in the film and television industry.

“Planet In Focus Green Screen is an innovative program, and it started about three years ago when members of the film and television industry got together and wanted to do something about [the fact] that production has a huge environmental footprint,” says Sarah Margolius, executive director of Planet in Focus.

: Director Michael McGowan of Score: A Hockey Musical with actor Stephen McHattie – Photo by Ken Woroner, Courtesy Score: A Hockey Musical

The Toronto-based organization educates industry professionals and the film-going public on the enormous impact film and television production has on the environment.

One of the ways Planet In Focus Green Screen is helping film productions remain environmentally conscious is by providing them with reports that measure their environmental savings. These include waste audits, greenhouse gas reduction modeling, as well as other initiatives.

“We are probably the most comprehensive and innovative program of its kind in North America,” Margolius says. “We are able to measure the impact of a production’s actions so we can see how many trees you saved or how many tons of greenhouse gas emissions you saved.”

Margolius says that a 2006 UCLA study showed that the film industry in Los Angeles is one of the main industries that contribute to a negative environmental impact. She says the film industry should strive to be a model for other industries in making ecological changes.

Avi Federgreen is a Canadian film producer and avid environmentalist. He approached Planet in Focus in 2009 for advice on what environmentally friendly production methods he could implement while creating his film, Score: A Hockey Musical. “We are the first real Canadian feature film that has gone to the extent that we went to,” says Federgreen.

Planet in Focus helped the relatively small $5 million production save more than 10,000 plastic water bottles, something Federgreen says was very rewarding for him as an environmentalist.

He says it is “appalling” how much waste the Canadian film industry produces and how little is being done about it. “How many Canadian features actually went green last year? I would probably say the numbers are pretty small. How many TV series went green? It would be less than you can count on one hand.”

Federgreen has promised that he will go green where he can on set and every movie he creates will not devalue the industries environmental impact. “There aren’t many producers out there like me that are adamant about going green. We take it extremely lightly; it’s kind of ridiculous. I don’t know what needs to happen to make it change. But we better do something and we better do something quick,” he says.

Planet in Focus is a strong advocate for getting youth involved, through programs such as their Youth, Camera, Action! – an environmental production program for youth. The program, held every summer in downtown Toronto, helps teach about 25 kids between the ages of 13 and 18 to make a short film based on an environmental subject matter. By doing so, the youth learn about green practices.

Planet in Focus organizers are banking on those who become eco-conscious at a young age to keep the environment in mind later in their careers. “We would like to get Green Screen into the post-secondary school system to teach them how to green their production, and I think that’s a very important initiative that we want to move forward on,” says Kathleen Mullen, programming director for Planet in Focus.

Another initiative is their Environmental Film Festival, an event held annually in Toronto. Their 12th festival will take place from Oct. 12 to 16, 2011. “It’s a forum for discussion on important issues related to films, with distribution, production and pre-production,” says Margolius.

“Going green is not a charity,” Margolius adds. “You don’t have to sacrifice a lot of money to go green. This is actually an opportunity for our industry to get ahead and really foster a sustainable production.”

Looking to Asia to Boost the Biz

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:53 +0000

By Andrea Hall

Spatially, Canada is the second-largest country in the world and boasts a variety of landscapes, backdrops and climates that make it an ideal location for almost any film.

Want to make a show about a farming community in wide-open prairies? Canada can do that. Need to film a sequence of a daring mountain rescue? No problem. Big cities, waterfalls, beaches, frozen tundra – Canada’s got it all covered.

Despite its vast area, its market is small. With fewer than 35 million people, filmmakers and television producers often find there’s just not enough support at home.

“There’s only so much content that Canadians can consume while fully supporting our industry,” says Susanne Vaas, vice-president of business affairs and recording secretary for the Canadian Media Production Association. “Canadian producers really have to look elsewhere, not only for the eyeballs but to generate the returns so they can grow their companies, and make even more productions and really get Canada on the map in terms of a good content producer.”

Courtesy Man Nan Ma

Cue international co-production treaties.

“Co-productions fit with Canada’s overall cultural model which is one of inclusiveness and establishing strong ties all over the world. I think film and television is a great way to do that,” says Paddy Bickerton, business and legal affairs at Reunion Pictures in British Columbia.

Canada has co-production treaties with 53 countries which have allowed producers to collaborate internationally on hundreds of film and television projects. Recently, however, those same producers have said Canada needs to re-examine its agreements to allow more effective and fruitful treaties to emerge.

“The industry has made repeated requests for the completion and implementation of a co-production policy,” Geneviève Myre, media relations advisor for the Department of Canadian Heritage said via email to Fine Cut. She indicates in response the government created such a policy and ran an online consultation through February and March this year.

One of the issues brought up was the need to have more effective treaties with partners previously underutilized. Traditionally, Canada’s main co-production partners have been European, with France and the United Kingdom topping the list from 2000 to 2009. But new agreements within the European Union, as well as the convenience of working with nearby nations, have led European partners to look more to each other than to Canada.

As a result, Canadian involvement in co-productions has declined. In 2009, the Canadian co-production industry amounted to barely half of what it had been in 2000. Vaas says one solution is to broaden its reach and attract a wider array of partners.

The benefits of co-productions are clear. “If it’s an official co-production under treaty, the content that’s created is considered domestic content in both countries so it facilitates access to the airwaves,” explains Richard Brownsey, president and CEO of British Columbia Film. He says co-productions usually have a higher budget than domestic projects. “If you can bring another partner to the table, get some access to their markets and get access to the financial incentives that exist in both countries, it makes it a more viable project. It allows you to put more money into the content and that results in better content on the screen.”

While Brownsey makes clear that the British Columbia film industry doesn’t want to forget its traditional partners or ignore potential collaborations with other English-speaking countries, he agrees that there is an increasing interest on emerging markets. “There are very, very large markets in Asia that are developing rapidly and we need to examine those to see what that potential may be.”

This belief was reflected in the British Columbia Film submission to the government consultation process, which states that Asian-Pacific markets, specifically China and India, should be priorities for Canada in the future. Other contributors to the consultation process also point to Asian countries as potentially promising partners.
[pullquote]“I think if the treaty is simplified, there will be more incentive for producers to work with other countries. It’s quite a daunting process to put together.”
- Paddy Bickerton, Reunion Pictures[/pullquote]
Nelvana Ltd specializes in animated children’s content, and suggests Canada actively pursue treaties with Malaysia, India and China, all known for their animation industries. Currently, Canada has only a film treaty with China, and no treaty at all with Malaysia or India.

Bickerton suggests that producers tend to rely on traditional co-production partners because there is a level of comfort in navigating those treaties. “The Canada-U.K. treaty is one that is well-used and people are familiar with,” she says. Canadian producers, especially from smaller film companies, can be hesitant to try working with new partners because they don’t already have a thorough understanding of the treaty. “I think if the treaty is simplified, there will be more incentive for producers to work with other countries. It’s quite a daunting process to put together a co-production,” she explains.

Shan Tam, co-founder of Holiday Pictures, agrees that comfort plays a huge role when forging a co-production, not just in terms of understanding the treaties but also in knowing who you’re working with.

“There’s always a certain trust factor in doing co-production, it’s just like a marriage,” she says. Tam was born in Hong Kong and spent the early part of her career working in the Hong Kong film industry before moving to Vancouver and founding Holiday Pictures in 1992.

Tam says in her experience the biggest challenge is not actually the treaties but often finding financing. “Getting the co-production status is only the first step of getting the project going. Even after we do get that, it’s still a question of whether the project can get the distributors on board and get the funding agencies on board.”

As a result of these struggles, Tam has spent most of her time recently involved in the Chinese film industry rather than Canada’s. “I’ve been just doing productions in China, actually doing something, rather than here trying to figure out how they can help me,” she explains. “It’s simply because [China’s] a very active market, it’s very busy and it has a lot more opportunities.”

A Search Renewed: Canadian Arts Funding

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:16:53 +0000

By Caitlin Decarie

For most business stories, writers are urged to follow the money. For stories about film and television in Canada, the story is more often about finding the money rather than following it.

Tales of devastating funding slashes, disappearing grants and just plain insufficient cash are all too familiar. In recent years however, deep cuts piled on other economic stressors have reached a critical level for some aspects of the industry.

“[The Conservative government]cut 14 different programs,” says Pablo Rodriguez, official opposition critic for Canadian Heritage and Official Languages. “They could never justify these on budget reasons.” A total of $46.1 million was cut to the arts, says Rodriguez. “It was obviously ideological cuts because basically, they wanted to have some kind of control.”

Rodriguez speaks with a strong passion about Canadian arts and how it impacts our culture. “Realize that culture is important for Canadians – it’s about us. It’s our present and future,” says Rodriguez.

Training for the movie sector was cut by $1.5 million, and the Independent Film and Video Fund program which was primarily funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage, was cut on April 1, 2009 without justification, says Rodriguez. “That was money that was very well used and it had a real impact on our creators, especially in the documentary sector,” he says. “Money was essential to prepare generations of directors, producers, filmmakers.”

“It was a really bad decision and it hurt Canada and our reputation internationally,” he adds.

[pullquote]“That’s been the mandate of this particular government – no new funds.”
Ira Levy, executive producer[/pullquote]

The Independent Film and Video Fund financed films in various communities across Canada that focused on issues such as community outreach and social or educational issues. Ira Levy was on the board of directors and a co-chair for the fund and is now executive producer and partner of Breakthrough Entertainment in Toronto. He believes the fund was extremely important to industry.

Levy says there wasn’t a lot of funding for grassroots films unless it was being made for commercial television and then it would have a much larger budget and more established filmmakers. The fund was one of the last resorts for an independent film producer or director, says Levy. With over 50 filmmakers being funded each year, the final projects would reach thousands of Canadians. Levy says the fund’s budget was between $1 and $2 million each year and that money would be dispersed between these 50 projects. “From that point of view I think it was very successful as a project that would very efficiently use the funds that it had and get it into a lot of different film and video projects,” says Levy.

The Independent Film and Video Fund exclusively financed novice filmmakers, allowing talent to find their path and get off the ground. The fund’s alumni include Atom Egoyan and Laszlo Barna, producer of Intelligence and Da Vinci’s Inquest.

The unique characteristic of the Film and Video Fund was its accessibility to anyone in Canada. “You just had to have the right passion and the right idea,” says Levy. What little amount of money the fund could contribute whether it was just $10,000 or as high as $50,000, it would have a large impact, says Levy.

The fund was literally “cut off at the knees” as Levy says. “I think that [Canadian Heritage] unfortunately assessed that particular fund as being redundant, which in my opinion it is anything but because it was unique,” says Levy.

“There has been an effort to try and revitalize a new 2.0 or 4G model – if you will – of the fund but it’s hard,” says Levy who laments “that’s been the mandate of this particular government – no new funds.”

Where’s the money? Canadian Heritage suggested Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board, but Levy says that’s not the solution.

Ira Levy of Breakthrough Entertainment - Photo by Caitlin Decarie

“The mandate for Telefilm is to get five per cent of the Canadian box office for Canadian films so it is clearly trying to invest in more commercial films,” says Levy. Unless it was a feature film project, independent producers and directors might have a hard time getting their project funded by Telefilm. It’s small budget for independent works is mostly used for art house-type projects. “This is great but not what the Film and Video Fund was doing,” says Levy.

The National Film Board is certainly beneficial if you already work for them. Otherwise, a budding filmmaker is going to have some trouble, says Levy. However, the contradiction is clear. If you are working for the board then you aren’t an independent. So this really isn’t the place for an independent to be looking for funding.

Canadian Heritage says arts funding has increased since Stephen Harper has been prime minister. From 2007 to 2008, the Treasury Board led a strategic review – “a rigorous process to ensure sound management” – of Canadian Heritage. This resulted in funding for two programs to be re-allocated. This included the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund.

New funding is perhaps tied to new media. In the spring of 2010, the Canadian Television Fund transformed to become the Canada Media Fund, says Levy. Now all projects for the CMF need to have a convergence element, such as an iPhone application, in addition to the television show or film. Unfortunately, Levy says, the Film and Video Fund wasn’t able to make this transition and it would have fit in perfectly with the mandate.

“You can’t think of shows as a linear narrative medium anymore,” says Eva Ziemsen, film and television production program co-ordinator at Humber College in Toronto. The new element has to be interactive and will most likely involve new media. “I think almost every funder in Canada has adopted some kind of changes in relation to the new media strategy or realm.”

Ziemsen, who teaches courses on women in film and television among others, revamped her curriculum last year to incorporate new media and emerging technologies into the funding seminar. “There used to be a workshop on emerging technologies but now I’ve had to inject everything about new media into the funding lecture because that’s where it starts.” The structure of funding has trickled all the way down to how students are being trained and educated.

“You have to look at [the change] as positive,” says Ziemsen, “otherwise you become one of those disgruntled people who say, ‘oh, it’s all going haywire.’”

Running With the Bulls

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:11:48 +0000

By Adam Carter

Cast into the Atlantic Ocean on Canada’s eastern side, the island of Newfoundland is known for many things: a rugged, worn coastline, battered by high winds and pervasive fog. Salt-strewn streets and even saltier food, coupled with a dialect that is both parts lively and borderline indecipherable. A rich and varied history filled with hardships, entertainers, struggles and storytellers.

The Newfoundland Coastline - courtesy Sandra Elford

St. John’s, the capital, is not a burgeoning metropolitan centre. Though it has a thriving arts community and a plethora of rural live theatre, Newfoundland is much more at ease with being called quaint than it is hip. This is not to discount the depth and scope of the Newfoundland arts community: this little island has produced some of the best art this country has ever seen.

But hip, it isn’t.

That all changed in 2009, when Republic of Doyle started filming for CBC. Suddenly, the arts world exploded. Jobs opened for actors, production staff, culinary services – the world was immediately their oyster. Downtown St. John’s was transformed seemingly overnight into a hubbub of camera crews, lighting trucks, and cordoned off streets. This little town now boasted a hit television series, and its winding streets were jammed full with Canadian stars, film crews, and more people that could stake their claim as a film extra than Newfoundland had ever seen.

With a production this monumental must come change, but how has the arts community shifted? Has Doyle irrevocably transformed the scene in Newfoundland and if so, how?

Doyle’s executive producer John Vatcher lives in Newfoundland, and with his wife Debbie, has raised two kids on the island. His love for Newfoundland is palpable when he speaks, and it quickly becomes evident that he sees the island as an intrinsic part of the show.

“I think that the land actually shapes you, and learning to be a musician or an entertainer is something that you take on here, it’s not given. We have a sense of what is important, what is not, and what we love,” he says.

“If we’re gonna go listen to music, well why not just go play music? If we’re gonna go watch a play, well then why not just act? We love to entertain ourselves, we don’t wait for anyone else to do it.”

He mentions Canadian actors that have called Newfoundland their home, and the names quickly start to pile up: Rick Mercer, Mark Critch, Allan Doyle, Shaun Majumder, Mary Walsh, Gordon Pinsent, the list goes on. “These people become well received in Canadiana because they’re funny, vibrant, and very talented,” he says.

He’s quick to point out while Republic of Doyle has in fact altered the arts community, it has done so in tandem with hordes of talented Newfoundlanders who are getting the chance to showcase their craft. “With Doyle being here we need craftspeople, we need the lighting business, we’ve actually trained piles of people in the last two years as to how to be a background artist,” he says.

“We can expose actors that might otherwise have had to go to Toronto, we can use them as Newfoundlanders and add that flavour to the show, and we can showcase it.” There’s a kind of almost nationalistic pride that comes in using born and bred Newfoundlanders as much as possible, and it speaks to the ideals and sense of togetherness that has been created.

Vatcher believes the arts community as a whole will only get better as Doyle continues. He sees actors getting better as they audition more, and local musicians finding a place on television for their voices. Vatcher and company have already catalogued the songs of hundreds of local musicians for use on the show.

“[Doyle] has everybody bring their ‘A’ game – we get the benefit of that and they get the benefit of us. It’s a true collaboration. I don’t think we could tell the story in any other city, and we’re very happy that the arts community are our best partners.”

That contagious excitement that resonates throughout Newfoundland doesn’t begin and end with the producers. Krystin Pellerin plays Constable Leslie Bennett on set, and she can attest to the lift now found on these shores. “There’s just been this infusion, and everyone has come together suddenly. The whole arts community is coming together in a huge way,” she says. “There’s a great feeling going around, a wonderful energy.”

Allan Hawco on the set of Republic of Doyle - Photo by Ian Vatcher, courtesy Republic of Doyle

Pellerin started acting at the age of 14 with the Shakespeare by the Sea theatre company, performing the Bard’s work on the jagged cliffs of Logy Bay and Cape Spear. She then found herself working with the Beothuk Street Players and MUN Drama, before heading to the mainland for school and work. It was her role in Republic of Doyle that brought her back to the province she loves. “The spirit and the strength of the community has always been here and thrived, and now Doyle has really raised the bar,” she says.

She concedes that one of the biggest things hurting Newfoundland’s arts community presently is funding. “I remember seeing some of the best plays I’ve ever seen here – it’s a very thriving community without the funding behind it, so people would do it just because it needed to be done.”

Having lived here and knowing the community well, Pellerin knows how difficult it is to make a living as an artist in Newfoundland. “You come across a lot of people who are extremely talented at a lot of different things because they have to be, which is pretty unique to St. John’s because of the amount of funding available,” she says. Many people are forced to become a kind of jack of all trades to simply make ends meet.

Now, with Doyle into its second season and looking at a third, the cash influx has helped enable creators to do what they really want: create. “It’s boosted morale for the arts scene big time,” she says. “On lunch breaks people are all talking about the short films they’re making, and their side projects.”

That sentiment is echoed by Melanie O’Brien, who had a short role on Doyle in its first season. O’Brien is a working entertainer in St. John’s, making a living day to day as a musician and actress. She firmly believes the show has radically altered the way the arts community is now running. From one day of work on set with a speaking role, she did so well with pay and an extra ACTRA credit that she didn’t have to search for a nine-to-five summer job as she usually does, which allowed her more time to focus on acting and music – her real passions.

“What Doyle is doing is cutting out the joe-job,” she says. “It’s giving artists more time to focus on their craft and what they really want to do, therefore they’re getting more done, therefore there’s more music being released here, there’s more plays happening here, it’s just really enriching the whole scene.”O’Brien says every time she watches Doyle she sees familiar faces from the local arts community. “When I see them, I know that it was a great boost and a great lift for them. Not just for confidence, but financially as well.”

Not only that, O’Brien says the cast and crew are just really fun to work with. Cast dinners and hockey games help foster a sense of community. “It’s one of the nicest casts I’ve ever seen,” she says. “They fed me a lot … I feel like a princess every time I’m on set. Someone’s always knocking on your door and saying ‘Are you hungry, can I get you anything?’ and maybe some actresses don’t take them up on it – but I’m an actress who eats.”

Philip Goodridge, another St. John’s-based actor who had a part on season one of Doyle, knows that his artistic community has always been strong, but says the show is still a boost for the province overall. “The exterior shots are excellent, because in every movie or television show that I’ve seen about Newfoundland, everything looks so damn foggy and bleak and miserable.” He laughs, adding “at least on Doyle there’s a bit of bloody sunshine, you know?”

“There’s a lot of consistent work on the production side, which is awesome to have. And it’s great for those who have lead roles,” he says.

He believes dedication on all fronts is key. “Everyone that I work with that has auditioned for the show and that has gotten on the show, we try really hard and we make a good effort here. People kill themselves in this town even doing volunteer stuff.” That in itself is the crux of the problem that lies within Newfoundland and the way Doyle is changing it. There are so few venues in which the creators can create, and yet still be paid for it. Doyle is enabling steady work and stability, something performers deserve just as much as any other profession.

Rick Boland has been on both stage and screen in Newfoundland for over four decades, and he knows this all too well. “It’s a very difficult life when you’re self-employed,” he says. “I’ve been at it for 40 years but I have no pension. I don’t have the security of a future that I can retire into.”

Boland’s massive body of work includes CBC’s Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, as well as Newfoundland theatre stalwart Revue, which still sells out houses all over the province after 25 years. Even so, he is far from rolling in revenue generated through acting. “We often sell ourselves short because we want to do the project anyway. You think ‘I love this, so I’ll do it for next to nothing’,” Boland says. “This is not a field that you get into unless you can’t do anything else. I don’t mean that you’re not capable of doing anything else, but that nothing else makes you happy.”

Photo by Ian Vatcher, Courtesy Republic of Doyle

Boland knows Doyle is doing plenty for the Newfoundland arts community, but cautions this is a case of “be careful what you wish for.” There’s a vortex brewing in Newfoundland when it comes to crew, and it’s culminating because of the show. “Crew are all used for Doyle, so other producers just can’t produce anything because they have none,” he says.

Ironically, Newfoundland’s producers would have to bring in their crew from elsewhere, which means hotel bills on top of salary, making the entire venture more expensive. “The fact that the crew that we’ve built here is now doing Doyle is great. It’s fabulous to have a national television show that’s going into its third season out of St. John’s…But we now need to build a new crew.” This isn’t Montreal or Toronto – this city really only has one production crew, essentially.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Boland says cautiously, “For the 10 or 12 regulars on the show it’s utterly fantastic, it’s out of this world. I know people who have bought and paid for houses off of Republic of Doyle, and that’s wonderful – we need more of it. But the thing on everybody’s minds is – if you have your whole crew working on one production, then you pretty soon stagnate. If you don’t start building a second crew so that you’re growing, then, God forbid…” he says, trailing off.

An arts community is only as good as the innovation behind it. Every artist deserves some stability, but comfort is precarious – to rely on a single lucrative production sets the art scene up to fester in mediocrity around that one gem. What happens when it’s gone?

Common sense would then seem to dictate there is an easy fix here: simply hire more crew. More work for everyone should be a great thing, and in some ways, it is. Though the construction of secondary crew has started, it still can be difficult. “When you have to build a crew, that costs money,” Boland says. “You’re talking about training, so you’re talking about doubling up in some instances. In your camera department, instead of an efficient unit, you have a bunch of people who are apprenticing.” Without the proper guidance, who is there to ensure the quality that’s needed for this next generation?

All his technical worries and woes aside, Boland does equate Republic of Doyle with that certain kind of nationalism a place like Newfoundland breeds. “It’s very difficult for artists in Ontario to create things about Ontario,” he says. “Because Ontario doesn’t give a good god damn about itself. It doesn’t have that, so it’s harder to sell. And because they aren’t an island, they’re part of the stream – so they think it’s much more important to emulate an American tradition. Whereas here, it’s very important to us that we celebrate our difference, and in many ways Doyle does that.”

“As much as it is Rockford Files, and as much as it’s American formulaic detective drama, it’s also unmistakeably Newfoundland. Jake Doyle is the son of Gordon Pinsent’s rowdy man – that character is a part of us.”

CGI or Makeup? The Evolving Art of Making Movies

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:11:40 +0000

By Colin Ellis

It’s a mask so fascinating viewers can’t take their eyes off it.

Bringing to life Rorschach, the most infamous character in the classic graphic novel Watchmen, was one of the challenges for Zack Snyder when he adapted the novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons into a feature film in 2009.

Dressed like a detective from a film noir, Rorschach is arguably the most dangerous and compelling character in Moore and Gibbons’s book, an uncompromising anti-hero alienated from the rest of society. Part of what makes him so fascinating is his mask – a cloth with a constantly morphing inkblot. The designs they create are ambiguous patterns similar to the character’s namesake, a Rorschach test. They appear to have a mind of their own. They move across his face like liquid and are in some ways a reflection of the character himself: morally ambiguous and deeply mysterious.

: Courtesy Randy Daudlin

Snyder employed the services of Intelligent Creatures, a visual effects company based in Toronto to help with the design of Rorschach’s “face.” To produce such a complex effect, Intelligent Creatures used Houdini 3D animation software for some of the rendering and shading work. They also used Maya software to add lip synch and muscle movement to the character’s face, and completed the final composite rendering using Nuke, a node-based compositing software. The results can only be described as magical, and highlight the evolution and importance of CGI in creating visually complex characters and stories.

Lon Molnar, CEO and senior visual effects supervisor of Intelligent Creatures, says the flexibility of CGI allows filmmakers to envision the written word as it was imagined in the writer’s head. “We’re seeing all these old books that have been around a long time starting to be conceived in film because they can be,” he says. “Look at what it’s done for Marvel. We’re seeing all their comics being turned into movies because you can envision it properly.”

CGI has come a long way since John Lasseter created the first fully computer generated character for the 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes. Since then, movies like Jurassic Park, The Mask, and Avatar have used it to dazzle movie audiences. But how has this evolution in filmmaking affected more traditional film techniques like makeup and prosthetics? And how have makeup artists adapted to the CGI revolution?

Donald Mowat, a makeup artist on the movie The Fighter, says there was more flexibility in terms of shooting movies with traditional, out-of-kit makeup 20 years ago. But HD can sometimes make these tricks more noticeable, and directors have no choice but to use CGI in order to perfect the scene.

“Now everything’s so true to the eye,” Mowat says. “A lot of the tricks we used you can’t get away with and certainly at least 50 per cent of the prosthetic makeup that you used to see you would not buy anymore.”

Mowat says the use of CGI to enhance makeup on films has sparked a debate among makeup artists over what is and isn’t “pure” makeup. The three films nominated for best makeup at this year’s Academy Awards – The Wolfman, The Way Back and Barney’s Version – were enhanced by CGI. True Grit and The Fighter, which used more traditional, out-of-kit makeup were not.

Rather than go digital for The Fighter, however, Mowat was able to use some of his old makeup tricks to turn Mark Wahlberg’s face into a bloody pulp. “That was just done old school with some surgical gauze in his mouth and really colouring his face properly and creating an illusion,” he says. “I really take pride in being able to create a scar out of paint, latex, scar material and moulding material.”

Cost also factors into the decision to use CGI over makeup. Randy Daudlin, a makeup artist for the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and author of two film makeup books Reel Characters and Hurt ‘Em Reel Good, remembers a cannibal movie he worked on last summer that saw his work get pushed to the side when the producers thought it would be cheaper to go with CGI.

“At the eleventh hour, whoever was doing their visual effects made a deal and took everything and so we got squeezed out,” he says. “It was the first time I ever got replaced by a computer.”

Of course, the results of strictly relying on CGI don’t always work in the director’s favour. Daudlin says the filmmakers of the cannibal movie he was let go from realized they made a mistake when the film ended up looking like a disaster.

“How is a computer artist going to have blood seeping and the wardrobe staining and changing colour? All the details we do as makeup artists and keep track of as part of our continuity they won’t do. They can’t. It would cost so much money,” he says.

The advantage of using CGI in makeup is it allows filmmakers to enhance or augment an existing prosthetic as well as fix mistakes that can arise during shooting, says Miguel Sapochnik, director of the sci-fi action film Repo Men. “Certainly in all the CGI work I do we spend as much time as possible to get it as amazingly detailed and clear-looking as possible,” he says. However, in creating suspension of disbelief, Sapochnik says the problem with CGI is how noticeable it can be if used incorrectly or to completely replace makeup or prosthetics. “CGI has many great uses, but the reason you would rather use the real thing is because it is the real thing, and so the way it interacts with light, atmosphere and ultimately the actor is very hard to recreate effectively.”

But the question of what looks more realistic on screen is one that both visual effects and makeup artists grapple with. While the technology has certainly come a long way from Young Sherlock Holmes, some question the realism of CGI compared to makeup and prosthetics. Kalene Dunsmoor, a former digital artist for Lucasfilm in Singapore, says CGI can sometimes turn audiences off.

“There’s actually scientific studies that say puppets can evoke a more positive human reaction versus something close to being a human like a robot or CG double,” she says.

Dunsmoor points to Tron: Legacy and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as examples of digital effects being used to create digital human doubles, but says the effect isn’t always convincing.

“I don’t think anyone’s quite perfected the human digital double yet and I don’t think people are going to be accepting of them until we get it dead-on accurate.”

Indiana Allemang, a film and TV makeup artist from Toronto agrees. She says that regardless of the technological advances, the detachment people feel watching a movie with people alongside computer generated humans is still there.

“There are some things you can’t do with CGI,” she says. “You also have to think about it from an acting standpoint, where some people are not believable with their CGI counterparts, like Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon.”

CGI also removes some of the magic of great makeup, says Mowat.

A motion capture suit - Photo by Sarah Horwath

“I think it takes away a lot of the fun and creativity for people like me who came up in the traditional system before we had all this digital,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s always the right thing.”

But for Molnar, it all depends on your perception. “You can talk about it taking away from the movie magic, but look at what it’s done for movie magic,” he says. Without this technology, Molnar says movies like Lord of the Rings and Avatar would not exist. “Makeup artists may not necessarily like the fact that we can do some of that stuff but the fact is we can do it.”

Mike Habjan, a visual effects artist on Saw IV agrees, pointing out that older technology limited directors to using things like miniatures like in Tim Burton’s Batman films, where they used models to create the look of Gotham City. Now, computers are involved in almost every detail of a film’s production.

“For the work of compositors, there’s always touch ups to be done on scenes and little effects to be added. They go into scenes and you don’t even notice it. It just looks natural.”

Habjan notes that while some people criticize CGI for being too noticeable or fake, filmmakers are getting better at making it look as real as possible. “In most Hollywood movies, you’re not going to notice the CG, but it’s in there and that’s the goal.”

Despite the apparent tension between makeup and visual effects artists, there are times when the two work well together. Daudlin says that it all depends on the quality of the people working in both fields to make it look right.

“[Animators] are basing their animation on models that we create for them and that’s what makes it look real… It all depends on their skill sets, our skill sets. The better the actual artist, the better the end product.”

Molnar also says makeup artists are still needed, but that they need to embrace the new technology. “Their techniques and skill sets are integral. They’re the basic principles to what we do in the digital world.”

Ultimately, filmmakers are trying to tell a story, and CGI can help facilitate that in ways unimagineable ten years ago. CGI is part of the toolkit, Sapochnik says, and it can allow artists to run riot with their imaginations. But there’s also something endearing about tangible creations, like the creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing, or Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. Both feel inexplicably real and accessible even if there’s something primitive-looking about them.

The goal of CGI seems to be perfection, not only in a films look but in getting the performance of an actor to synch with a director’s vision. But for Sapochnik, what makes film a unique format is its natural imperfections.

“What tends to happen [with CGI] is that it’s so clean and it’s so perfect it basically defies reality, and reality is imperfect.”

Whatever technique is used, story matters most. As Dunsmoor points out, the goal of visual effects should be invisibility. Ironically, both CGI and makeup are doing their best not to be noticed.

Facing the Music

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:11:32 +0000

By Cathleen Finlay

My brother, Charlie Finlay, has less than a week until deadline. A DVD just arrived by courier and now he’s under pressure to compose the music for the latest short film project he’s been hired to work on.

The clips are bare with only dialogue and a separate track with temporary music. It’s up to him to create the musical landscape in just six days that will make the scenes come alive.

It can seem sometimes that the people who write music for film and television are in the business of making magic. I’ve always watched my brother’s ability to take a silent clip and come up with many versions, each drawing out different nuances with fascination. But writing music for the screen is not as simple and whimsical as it may seem.

In recent years, there have been big changes in the industry. Increasingly cheaper software has meant that anyone living in their parents’ basement with a MacBook and Logic can call themselves professional musical screen composers. The ever-growing occurrence of undercutting has caused individual profits to continue to slide. Now, more than ever, composers need to nurture a diverse set of skills in a variety of areas while also committing a lot of time and energy to the complex craft of music composition for the screen.

Charlie Finlay - All photos by Cathleen Finlay

“I’m in it for the long haul,” Charlie says, despite all this. “Good musicians and composers will find a way to make a living creating music. I just love doing it.”

Music composition for the screen is a world governed by tight deadlines and low budgets, where beloved work is often left on the cutting room floor. And yet, the number of composers continues to swell. People are finding creative ways to make a living in the industry and support offered by organizations like the Screen Composers Guild of Canada (SCGC) provide composers with education and community.

But more than anything, composers continue to do it because they love it too much not to.

When Charlie composes, it isn’t as simple as dreaming up melodies according to his tastes. “Doing music for film and television is different because it’s for a specific purpose and it’s for something…that already exists,” he says. “Music is a slave to the project that you’re working on.”

Although the composer and the director work in tandem to figure out musical themes, it’s not always easy to communicate these ideas. “It’s best to work with the director and talk in emotional terms, not in musical terms,” Charlie explains. “Because if the director hasn’t gone to school for music, they may have different ideas about what musical things mean.”

Toronto film director Chris Ross agrees: “If you don’t have a common language then they’re trying to understand where I’m coming from and I’m trying to communicate as much as I can with the limited tools that I have.”

It’s up to the composer to translate the emotional core of a scene into musical notation. “I’ve always been quite amazed by how adaptable composers are,” Ross says. “You collaborate and yet they go off and do their thing. It’s almost like a separate art form on top of the film.”

Although the job sounds difficult, changes in the industry over the last several years have made it even harder. Improved software has allowed composers to work with better quality instrumentation, minimizing the need for live musicians while still producing great sounding clips. While instruments on computers are sounding more realistic, the cost of gear and software is going down.

The problem is, the less expensive the tools, the more saturated the business becomes.

“The accessibility through technology really makes it very easy for a lot of people,” SCGC President Marvin Dolgay says. “The challenge is basically that there’s tons of people doing it. How do you make a full time career out of it?”

Composers don’t just have to compete with many other people for jobs, they also have to combat undercutting. Because new composers are trying to build their reel with clips illustrating their work, some will offer their services for free. Although it seems harmless, this devalues the work of everyone else in the business.

Toronto composer and guitarist Brian Seligman says young composers new on the scene usually aren’t aware of the damage they’re doing and undercut unknowingly. “What happens is a lot of people are just making a lot of music from their computer and they feel like ‘Oh it didn’t cost me anything!’” Seligman says.

Part of the problem of undercutting is how it affects attitudes towards the payment of musicians, Seligman says. “Plumbers get paid 60 bucks an hour for their work and nobody even questions it,” he says, “but musicians get paid virtually nothing all the time and nobody questions that. For some reason it’s completely okay to ask a band to play at a venue for free but you would never ask a plumber to come fix your sink for free.”

To compound the problem of saturation and undercutting, most musicians never learned money management skills, Seligman says, which makes negotiating budgets difficult.

“You go to school for music and they said, ‘this is an arts school where the focus of your degree is to learn how to perform that art.’ So making a living off it really wasn’t their concern for us,” he says.

Music composers operate in a crowded industry where their work is often devalued and there is little tangible instruction on how to make a living in the workforce. When the hourly wage is calculated, Charlie says it often works out to be $10 per hour. “The numbers are horrifying,” Seligman says. “The number of composers who are out there who actually make a living off of what they do – it’s virtually non-existent.”
[pullquote]“Music is the most amazing
part of filmmaking…it
influences the entire thing
so deeply and intrinsically.”
- Chris Ross, director[/pullquote]

So how are composers getting by if the numbers are so horrifying? Marvin Dolgay says just like in any other career, “really good people will always do well.” He stresses that people need to put in the time and effort nurturing relationships and learning the complicated art. Composers need to “really dedicate themselves to that medium, get relationships with editors, directors, producers, et cetera, and really continue on that path dedicating yourself and doing it as a career rather than as a hobby.”

But it isn’t as simple as that. “On one hand, I know I’m saying if you want to be successful screen composing you need to dedicate yourself,” Dolgay says, “but on the other hand that’s also a bit of suicide.” He says composers have to do whatever work they can get to make it, including advertising, web-based work or production.

It’s a delicate balance between composing and developing new skills. Composers survive when they’re able to find a variety of avenues for income. “For me it was a matter of work opportunities and being more well-rounded in terms of being multi-media, technical, and creative,” Toronto composer Kevin Fallis says. “If someone wants to come to me with a project that needs music composition, sound design, and editing, I’ll be able to do all those things.”

Working from small studios with only a computer for a companion, many composers feel alone. The SCGC helps to bring musicians together through social events and educational seminars. “We have events with each other, just to become part of a community so that people aren’t in isolated studios,” Dolgay says. The events remove the isolation, but also allow musicians to network. “You become friends with these people and you pass around gigs so if somebody gets a gig and it doesn’t work for their timeline then they’ll send it your way and vice versa,” Seligman says.

Talking with other composers about industry rates is helpful for composers as well: “We don’t always talk shop, but when we do, a lot of the conversations are based on budget,” Seligman says. “How to work a budget out, how to speak with directors about budget and things to keep in mind. Because musicians, for whatever reason, have a tendency to undercut themselves as far as budget and money.”

Dolgay made it clear that the guild does not set rates, but it does educate musicians about pay expectations. “We can give composers a range…So if they’re working under that, they can make a value judgment themselves and try to promote the idea that if they’re taking a job, it’s either to create a relationship, create a credit, create a good musical experience, create a pay cheque. If there’s two or three of those that are good, they should take the job. But the idea is that you should know what the job is.”

He also insists composers don’t need to take whatever they can get. “There’s tons of ways to negotiate,” he says. “There’s rights, territories, exclusivity. There are things, other than dollars that are negotiable.”

The community created by the guild is unique to Canada, Dolgay says. In the U.S. many screen composers are extremely competitive, often creating a less-than-friendly work environment for musicians. “We’re Canadian,” Dolgay says. “I think our guild has really, through the years, nurtured that community spirit and our concept that the rising tide raises all ships. What’s good for one guy is good for everybody. We want everyone to succeed here. If people are saying that you can get a good job done in Canada, that benefits all of us.”

As for the future of the industry, Dolgay is optimistic. He sees that other mediums have yet to figure out how they will fit into a highly advancing technological future. Television “still hasn’t sorted out the Internet so how can we?” he asks. “I think that’s the danger – that it’s all out there and there’s file sharing and it’s hard to track and stuff. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we as creators now have access directly to our consumer – be it a film, a pop tune, a cat playing piano, whatever it is. And that changes the dynamic of the opportunities.”

The music made by musicians like Seligman, Fallis, and my brother is an important part of the media that Canadians have been consuming with an appetite that has been growing all the more voracious.

“Music is the most amazing part of filmmaking,” Ross says. “I’m always so shocked by how much music changes a film, or how much influence it can have on the whole film…it influences the entire thing so deeply and intrinsically.”

Dolgay says rather than being the demise of the industry, this is a profound opportunity. “How it will be monetized is still being worked out,” he says. “The distribution network is wide open, the ability to touch our fans and our consumers is huge – tons of opportunity. We’re just trying to figure out how to make a living through that opportunity.”

[cincopa AABA-l6f6IFo]

A Generation After Genocide

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:11:24 +0000

By Cooper Evoy

‘A Generation after Genocide’ is an ambitious in-progress project about Rwandan children affected by the genocide of 1994. It examines the healing power of sport, and how these children and survivors have used this soccer field as a means of reconciliation.

Even though the film has been three-years in the making, the finish line is still not in sight. For creators Jon Weiman and Torey Kohara, it has been one long learning experience that continues to this day. What originally began as a small project for a small organization has blossomed into what could potentially be the duo’s first feature-length documentary film.

When approached by the Narrative Therapy Centre of Toronto in 2008 to do a documentary on genocide survivors, Weiman had no idea where the project would lead.

“I did a documentary in 2006 on kids in Rexdale [a suburb of Toronto] who were addicted to drugs, and Narrative Therapy liked the work I did on that. They wanted me to go to Israel for a month, and then go to Rwanda for a month, and basically compare and contrast how Holocaust survivors dealt with grief and how Rwandan genocide survivors dealt with grief.”

Not a small task for a relatively novice filmmaker, still in the midst of completing a film degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. Regardless, Weiman set about creating a proposal and formulating ideas while waiting for the necessary funding to come through.

But the funding didn’t come. That, combined with scheduling issues on both ends, led to the project never growing beyond exchanged emails between the parties. It was at this point the project took on a new direction.

“I had told a friend at Queens about this project in passing, and he says, ‘you know I have a professor, Eugene, who I’ve become friends with who is a survivor of the genocide. You should at least meet him to pick his brain a little bit because if you’re going to do this project with Narrative Therapy you should at least know what you’re talking about.’”

While knowing a great deal about the Holocaust – his grandfather escaped from Auschwitz – Weiman knew relatively little about the Rwandan genocide. He arranged a meeting with Dr. Eugene Nshimiyimana, the formality of which Weiman greatly overestimated.

“I had all these questions written down, and I wanted to get his take, and after five minutes that all went away and it became a casual conversation,” Weiman says.

Dr. Eugene Nshimiyimana, a professor of French language and Francophone literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, had been teaching at Queen’s when first approached by Weiman.

Eugene Nshimiyimana speaks with his soccer players

“Jon came to me just to learn more about what soccer can be on a social level,” says Dr. Nshimiyimana.

During that initial meeting, Dr. Nshimiyimana told Weiman his story of using soccer to help heal the divide created by the genocide. In 1996, he started a soccer team for a group of Rwandan children. Having seen the political and social divide that had led to his country’s genocide, he wanted to play his part to ensure the next generation did not face similar circumstances.

“The history of Rwanda, it’s a history of division between Hutus and Tutsis, but kids don’t see life through those categories,” says Dr. Nshimiyimana. “After the genocide, there were a lot of suspicions between people, but among kids that wasn’t an issue. So bringing them together to play was my goal because I know if you don’t save young kids, you are just creating another tragic society.”

Intrigued by Dr. Nshimiyimana’s story, Weiman left the meeting and set out to inform his filmmaking partner, Kohara.

“He had grown up in sports his whole life,” says Weiman. “That wasn’t really my world. He can relate to that world more, the unifying power of sports.

“Eugene’s relationship with soccer and sport prior to, during, and after the genocide was a really, really powerful motivator for us,” says Kohara, also a Queen’s film student at the time. The two agreed they had an incredible story to tell, and decided to pursue the project.

Funding issues did not last long, as their unique idea attracted the interest of several production companies, including Kohara’s employer, Ontario Production Company (OPC). With the majority of funding locked down for an initial trip to Rwanda, the filmmakers prepared for their journey.

Having only done small projects previously, a documentary of this scale was something neither had experienced before and they admit they approached it with potentially overblown expectations.

“We were pretty idealistic,” Kohara says. “We thought there would be something there, and down the road we realized it wasn’t that cut and died. At the root of it all, we had an idea, but not a solid path to get to that idea.”

We went in as cowboys,” adds Weiman. “My thinking, at least, was that if we shot enough footage, a documentary would come from that.”

They travelled to Rwanda in the summer of 2009 with their team, equipment, and a general idea of what their documentary was about. They entered the country searching for stories that would play into their ideal narrative, which was the healing power of sport. Working with Dr. Nshimiyimana, they tried to encompass every side of the story into their film.

“When you talk about soccer and reconciliation, there’s a political side to consider, there’s a social side to consider, and there’s a psychological side to consider,” says Dr. Nshimiyimana. “It took us a lot of energy and collaboration to put all those levels together.”

Having worked so closely developing the project, Dr. Nshimiyimana felt comfortable that Weiman and Kohara would tell his story without portraying him in a way he was uncomfortable with – as a hero. Dr. Nshimiyimana believes that because most people view what happened in Rwanda as a tragedy, whoever does something about it will be portrayed as a hero. He only wants to be seen as part of a larger effort for reconciliation in his country, which the film’s narrative shows.

“We go from what I did, and we look into what other people did,” says Dr. Nshimiyimana. “That doesn’t mean what I did is bigger than what the other people did; it’s part of a general effort in the reconstruction of the country. We are all part of a society, and everybody brings his small stone to this big house.”

Dr. Nshimiyimana’s personal connection to the project gave the filmmakers access to their subjects right away, but he points out that it did not mean there weren’t questions.

“When you go on a project like that you don’t know what you are going to find,” says Dr. Nshimiyimana.
What Weiman and Kohara found was gaining people’s trust can be a difficult proposition for documentary filmmakers, as they are faced with the task of making the subject comfortable while also telling the most truthful story.

“The biggest thing is getting to know your subject, and allowing them to understand you’re not there to misrepresent them,” says Kohara. “But it’s difficult in a country like Rwanda where a) there aren’t so many westerners running around and b) there aren’t so many westerners running around with cameras.”

Despite the unfamiliar circumstances and the difficulties that accompany such an ambitious project, the duo and their team returned home after six weeks of shooting with what they felt was enough footage.

“When we got back, we kind of felt like a million bucks,” says Weiman. “Here we are, these students who made this film, we got on Canada AM, we were published in the Montreal Gazette, we were feeling like big shots.”

“But then we looked at our footage, and we were like, ‘what do we have here?’ It was a very weird thing when we got back and looked at the footage and said, ‘how do we put this together?’”

In hindsight, they agree that their first trip to Rwanda should have been done without cameras. Whether it be because of their inexperience making documentaries, or just getting caught up in their first production, they paid more attention to the aesthetic factors of the film as opposed to the most important part: the subjects.

“From my perspective, because we were trying to get this incredible narrative, we forgot about the human voices,” says Weiman.

In their initial interviews, the filmmakers took a very direct approach. Instead of getting to know the children, and digging deeper to explore each child’s approach to reconciliation, they asked the most straightforward questions possible. “Asking a kid directly, ‘how did soccer help bring the two sides together after the conflict?’ is a fine question to ask, but we never really asked, ‘who are you?’” Weiman says. “We never really got to their souls, as it were.”

Weiman acknowledges that these are things that a filmmaker can only learn through experience. “I don’t think we could have learned anything if we hadn’t gone and had these two years to process it.”

As both mature as filmmakers, they are also learning new things about their project and discovering the necessary steps needed to create the film they both imagined it would be.

They know their mistakes and know how to fix them, but the duo has made no return trips to Rwanda since their initial one in the summer of 2009. They both are up-and-coming commercial directors, operating under the production company Family-Style, and are bogged down with busy schedules.

Finding time for personal projects is difficult. However, the commercials that are preventing them from focusing on their documentary provide the means to pursue such personal ventures. “It’s the commercials that allow us to do stuff like this,” explains Kohara. “They are our livelihood, and you owe a certain amount of time to the people who are paying you.”

But that does not mean “out of sight”, out of mind. Both remain focused on completing their work, no matter how long it takes.

“I’m from the school of belief that there’s one way to make a film, and that is the right way,” says Kohara. “It’s completely separate from timelines, and budgets. You will know when your film is done.”

[cincopa AYHADmK55cir]

Tales of the North

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:11:12 +0000

By Jeffrey Doner

The majestic Canadian territory of Nunavut is rarely associated with video cameras, films, and actors – but a recent program created by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the Nunavut Film Development Corporation (NFDC) has created a buzz in Canada’s Far North.

Stories from Our Land is a workshop designed to teach aspiring Inuit filmmakers about the filmmaking process. David Christensen, executive producer for the North West Centre, was one of the driving forces behind the development of the workshop.

Christensen hopes the Stories from Our Land program will be a factor in encouraging Canada’s Inuit to get behind the camera and tell their tales.

“The NFB is really interested in helping to develop filmmaker and creator voices from the North to tell their own stories, ” says Christensen. “For the longest time it was southerners going up and telling stories from the North.”

The workshop, which took place in Iqaluit last November, gathered 28 participants from all over Canada’s territories. The NFB and the NFDC recruited editors, cameramen, directors, and filmmakers from across Canada with backgrounds in a variety of fields.

Christensen elaborated on the importance and hard work of the mentors. “[The filmmakers] have somebody there who they can mount ideas off of, they can get help operating the camera, help them edit, help them really know the craft of storytelling and editing and help them pull out a really interesting story.”

[pullquote]“They are sort of off to the races … their survival skills are going to be just fine.”
- Carrie Haber, filmmaker[/pullquote]

Under the guidance of the mentors, the participants were put to task, making a six to seven minute mini-film project. On the final night of the workshop, the films were screened for all in the community, Christensen says. The next part of the program was to get the new filmmakers to send in a proposal to make a film. “The caveat (was) they had to propose a film where they didn’t use interviews and they didn’t use narration,” says Christensen. It was about telling their stories visually.

The NFB has chosen four films from the group to produce. “We will fully finance them, work with the directors, and support them as we always do with emerging directors,” Christensen says. Montreal-based filmmaker and editor, Carrie Haber, was one of the mentors in Iqaluit. Those who participated were “people with anything from a passing interest to really dedicated documentary filmmakers that are coming up into their first professional productions.”

Haber says the whole community was there to talk about filmmaking and their experiences. “Some of them have made films before, but there are certain skills that you just don’t get from working in a vacuum.”

It’s not just about going up north and teaching people how to edit and use cameras, says Haber – it’s about the bigger picture. “The goal is to release the responsibility of people from the North to have to come down to the South to edit their films and produce their films, and get lighting people,” Haber says. “We’re trying to create a self-sufficiency of knowledge and skill level up there that is on par with Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver so that there can be a filmmaking community with a strong skill set. That’s the real goal.”

Christensen says that Canada’s North will be a significant place for the world in the long term. “On so many levels; politically, geo-politically, culturally, environmentally, there’s going to be a lot that happens in the North that will determine what Canada does over the next century,” he says. “If we can be a part of helping to tell some stories and providing a point of view and perspective on this place for other Canadians, I think that’s a great thing.”

Much of what is conveyed to the public of late deals with boundary disputes and global warming. Even so, Christensen says filmmakers have been mostly telling stories about culture and identity.

Nyla Innuksuk, a filmmaker from Iqaluit who participated in Stories from Our Land, was chosen to produce her film in association with the NFB and NFDC. She says the workshop has helped her make new relationships for future projects.

“It was a really great opportunity to meet all these other people up North who are interested in film and I’m definitely sure I’m going to be working with other people who took part in the workshops in the future on other projects,” Innuksuk says.

Innuksuk is shooting in the small hamlet of Pangnirtung on the northeast coast of Baffin Island, Nunavut which is inhabited by about 1,300 people. Her film, Inngiruti, is centered around a button accordion player named Simeonie Keenainak.

What makes this story unique is the history behind how the button accordion got to Pangnirtung in the first place. “In the 1800s when whalers were coming from Europe they would stop into these small communities and they’d bring musical instruments with them and play traditional Irish music,” Innuksuk says. “They brought over the button accordion and some other instruments and they actually also brought over their square dancing.”

Nunavut - Photo courtesy of Carrie Haber

Innuksuk says that because the music and dancing has been in the town for so long, it has become part of the local culture in some small Inuit hamlets and communities. “This accordion player, Simeonie, he’s one of the last people that are doing this and the town often gets together in the town hall and has square dances where Simeonie and his band play,” she says.

The film will be completely shot in Nunavut over a period of just a few days, which is exactly what the NFB and NFDC hoped would come from the Stories from Our Land program.

Allen Auksaq, a filmmaker from Nunavut, made a five-minute documentary about the cultural significance of the formation and construction of an igloo. In If You Want to Get Married, You Have to Learn How to Build an Igloo, Auksaq uses the natural sounds and landscape of Sylvia Grinnell Park in Iqaluit to capture the essence of igloo-building. “I grew up knowing that if I wanted to get married, I had to learn how to build an igloo. That was taught to me at an early age. I built my first igloo when I was 16,” Auksaq says.

When it comes to the growth of the Nunavut film industry, there is some cautious optimism. Haber said there is a lot of work to do in a competitive industry. “I see it as kind of a microcosm of what is happening all over the world,” Haber muses. Here, as elsewhere, it’s difficult to find funding for independent films.

“Because they are starting from scratch and coming into this model right away, I think that they’re not going to go in with the expectation that they’re going to be selling to these big distributors right away. It’s just get the things made and seen,” Haber says.

For now, Haber is optimistic about the industry. “They are sort of off to the races now,” she says. “I think their survival skills are going to be just fine.”

As an Inuit filmmaker herself, Innuksuk says programs like Stories from Our Land are crucial for the younger generation. “I definitely see programs like this really helping to invigorate this film industry that’s just starting to emerge in the North.”

“I think it was really great for some of these younger people up North that they got a chance to work with these really amazing mentors,” she says.

Auksaq says the growth of the film industry in Nunavut is very important for people to learn more about Inuit culture and identity. “Film and television is a medium that is being used by everybody in the territory. There has to be a way for us to influence what they watch and learn through television,” he says.

Christensen concurs. “You could tell they were just sort of bursting at the seams because they’re just so interested in not only letting southerners know about their story, but actually talking about themselves.”

Death of a Serial Killer

Archivist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:53:16 +0000

By Andrea Lawson

Remy Couture - Photo courtesy Kelso Rebel

On a wintry night in east Montreal, I stand on a porch waiting for Rémy Couture to answer his door. When it swings open, I am greeted by a pleasant, spiky-haired guy with a full sleeve of tattoos.

There’s a coffin in the living room. The downstairs workshop is unfinished, with cement floors and a low ceiling. There are limbs sticking out of buckets on the floor, and masks and pictures of bloodied people cover one of the walls.

Couture is a special effects artist based in Montreal. He has been in the industry for several years and has worked on indie projects and Hollywood blockbusters including The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and Death Race.

For Couture, the past two years have been a time he describes as a “nightmare.” The nightmare is far from over.

In October 2009, Couture received an email from a couple wanting him to do makeup and take pictures for a Halloween party they were hosting. On the date and time they were to meet, he got a call from the couple saying they couldn’t find his place. The male on the line asked Couture to step out of his house to meet them on the street. He did so and soon found himself face-to-face with the gentleman on the line.

“He grabbed me and told me I was under arrest,” says Couture. “I thought it was a joke.” The couple who had contacted Couture were actually police officers sent to arrest him. The female officer showed him her gun to assure him it was no joke. He was shocked.

“They trapped me like a pedophile.”

For five years, he had been working on and off on a side project, a website: Inner Depravity. The website featured photos and two short films of a serial killer, played by Couture, committing fictitious, often gruesome murders. “It’s a trip in the mind of a serial killer,” he says. Some of the titles for the photo sessions on the site include burn, enslaved, sacrifice and necrophilia. He describes Inner Depravity as dark and disturbing – but it drew people in. “People are attracted to horror,” he says. “I think it’s inside us.”

The website had been viewed by about 30,000 people, many of whom wrote back to Couture. “A lot of people hate what I do. I got a lot of hate mail,” he says. “But a lot of people liked it too.” People told him his work was very realistic, which is exactly what he was hoping for. “The goal was to create the most realistic psychopath.”

One year after his arrest, Couture was charged under Canada’s obscenity laws, specifically section 163 of the Criminal Code. If convicted, Couture could face up to two years in jail.

According to the Montreal police, information received from Interpol initially got them investigating Couture. “It was a notification of child molestation,” says Sgt. Ian Lafrenière, media relations supervisor for the Montreal police. Someone from Germany viewed the website; saw a child on the site and alerted the police. “We did investigate and found no indication the child was molested,” says Lafrenière. The police investigation report was submitted to the crown attorney, who decided to pursue the case, he says.

Kirsten Kramar, a criminology professor at the University of Winnipeg and co-author of the book, Sex and the Supreme Court: Obscenity and Indecency Law in Canada, says according to the obscenity laws, creators are not allowed to couple horror with anything that is sexually suggestive.

“My stuff is not real,” Couture says. “I represent a sad reality but there’s no sad reality behind it.” He says he’s not the only one doing this. “There’s a lot of disturbing stuff on the Internet,” he says. “I’m not a revolutionary of horror.”

But still, Sgt. Lafrenière counters with “We’re not talking about a site where people go just to see horror. We’re talking about a mix of that and sexually explicit images also.” He argues that just because other people do it, doesn’t mean it’s okay. “There are a lot of people speeding; it’s still not okay to speed.”

The Internet can be extremely useful but it can facilitate a lot of criminal activity, Lafrenière says. More laws could be helpful in getting this criminal activity in check and this may be one way to get them, he says. “We believe at the end of this, we might get some ground rules as to whether or not it was okay for Rémy to [create the site].”
[pullquote]“There’s a lot of disturbing stuff on the Internet. I’m not a revolutionary of horror.”
- Rémy Couture[/pullquote]

After the arrest, the Montreal police searched his home. What they were looking for is a mystery to Couture. “Maybe they were hoping to find corpses or something like that,” he says, joking that the officers didn’t brave a look inside the coffin. They seized his credit cards, computers and his passport. To Couture’s knowledge, they didn’t find anything illegal but prosecutors have pressed forward with the charge.

Kramar is doubtful about the possibility of a conviction sticking. “Maybe he’ll be convicted by a lower court but if it went to the Supreme Court of Canada, I don’t see there being a conviction,” she says. “It’s bizarre to me that they’re proceeding in that way. I can’t see there ever being a conviction because there is an artistic defence written into the obscenity law.”

Art is hard to define and apply the law to, Couture says. There are certain scenarios where the law can clearly be applied. Pictures of naked children, for example, are illegal, he says. His case is not so clear. “What I do is art,” Couture says. “It’s done in an artistic way.”

Lafrenière is not so sure. “Necrophilia, masturbating while touching cadavers….is this art?” Lafrenière points out there are probably different points of view on that. “For each person that will tell you this website is okay and that it is art, you will find the same number of people who will tell you the opposite,” he says. “I think it’s an important debate.”

: Couture specializes in the gruesome and grotesque – Photo by Andrea Lawson

Whether the obscenity laws violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been considered in the past. Ultimately, the laws have been found to be constitutional, says Peter Rosenthal, a lawyer for Roach, Schwartz and Associates and mathematics professor at the University of Toronto.

Still, the Crown has some work ahead. “The Supreme Court made it clear that a conviction for obscenity requires proof of harm,” Rosenthal says. “That might be the most difficult aspect of the charge for the Crown to prove in the case against Mr. Couture.”

In Kramar’s book, Sex and the Supreme Court, she and her co-author chart the changes in the tests the courts have used to determine whether or not material or sexual content is criminal or harmful to political values. Courts have put into practice a more abstract test for what counts as obscenity, she says. “It used to be courts at least were provisionally required to weigh evidence from the community.” Now, because the test has become more abstract, courts really don’t have to consider that information. “They can just make the decisions all by themselves,” she says. This is something that may not be well known but should be considered. “We’re flagging that as something that ought to be paid attention to.”

But the consequences of a conviction could be much more far reaching than jail time for Couture. “It will put a chill on the arts community when you have to think about whether or not the state is going to interfere with your artistic expression,” Kramar says. Some people Couture knows in the arts community have been watching his case closely. “People freak out because they don’t know what it will mean if I am found guilty.”

Always a little distrustful of prosecutors, Couture is now more suspicious. They’re trying to make an example out of him, he says. He is also stunned by the amount of time and energy that has been put towards his case. “It’s incredible to see all the time and the number of people working on this,” Couture says. “It’s the time and people they’re not spending on real cases.”

Filmmaker Frédérick Maheux is working on a documentary about what happened to Couture, the website Inner Depravity and the people behind it. Maheux, who has worked with Couture previously, knew about the hate mail Couture received in response to the website. Still, he was surprised by the arrest. “He had disclaimers and everything. It was really sudden,” he says. “I would have expected that he would have received a warning or something prior to this heavy sledgehammer-type judgment being given.”

He is unsure of the consequence beyond Couture. “If he is condemned, we don’t know how far the law will extend,” said Maheux. “Individuals who create artistic materials and show their skills on the web will be affected by the decision.”

Mélisa Dionne-Michaud helped with the writing of the script for the films and was one of Couture’s models. A big fan of horror movies and special effects, she was just as surprised about the arrest when Couture relayed what had happened. “He told me all the details and I thought it was a joke,” she says. “It was not possible that someone could be arrested for making too realistic special effects.”
[pullquote]“It’s not personal. We don’t make the laws, we are applying the laws.”
-Sgt. Ian Lafrenière[/pullquote]

In the documentary, Maheux hopes to get to the heart of why people got involved in the website. “I was trying to understand what the motivation was for the people who were behind the project, be it the models, Rémy himself and the people who took the pictures.” He has conducted interviews and asked people what it was like to work on the set and with Couture. “From what I have thus far, I think it was really a positive experience,” he says. “The working environment when the pictures were taken and the movie was done was really funny and happy-go-lucky.”

Dionne-Michaud, who has done special effects and makeup for films in the past really enjoyed the work environment. “On the set, the atmosphere was relaxed, funny and family-like,” she says. “If he asked me to participate again in a new project, I immediately would say, ‘yes!’”

In the art community, the reaction has been unanimous. “He is the victim of overzealous authorities,” says Dionne-Michaud. “His art can shock and is not appropriate for a certain audience, but to treat him like a murderer or a rapist is overwhelming.”

Couture is happy to have the opportunity to tell his story. “The best thing I can do to show people the reality of Inner Depravity is to show the people behind it.” The police and others are quick to judge him based on his look and his work, he says. “But I speak well and I defend my art. It surprises them.” The ordeal has affected his life but his resolve remains tough. “It’s poisoned my world,” he says. “But I will fight to the end. It’s kind of personal now.” Lafrenière disagrees. “It’s not personal,” he says. “We don’t make the laws, we are applying the laws.”

Couture’s trial will be in October, two years after his initial arrest. “I really hope that the jury will see how ridiculous this is,” says Dionne-Michaud. “Rémy is not a criminal. He is a professional trapped in the middle of a masquerade.”

Online

Archivist — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:24:51 +0000

Mike Radoslav

Online Layout

Art

Archivist — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:22:09 +0000

Ruth VanDyken

Art Director

Samina Esha

Assistant Art Director

Samar Ismail

Assistant Art Director

Jeff Doner

Photo Editor

Cooper Evoy

Designer

Sarah Horwath

Photographer

Phil Maciel

Photographer

Alisha Parchment

Photographer

Editors

Archivist — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:21:09 +0000

Joe Engelhardt

Assignment Editor & Copy Editor

Phil Maciel

Assignment Editor

Cathleen Finlay

Assignment Editor & Research Chief

Henji Milius

Assistant Research

Emma Brown

Section Editor

Emily Innes

Section Editor

Jordan Whelan

Section Editor

Alex Zakrzewski

Section Editor

Thomas Csercsa

Copy Editor

Kelly Schweitzer

Copy Editor

Executive

Archivist — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:20:16 +0000

Adam Carter

Editor-in-Chief

Caitin Decarie

Executive Editor

Lindsay Tsuji

Managing Editor Production

Katie O’Connor

Assistant Managing Editor Production

Lawrence Dushenski

Managing Editor Online

Andrea Lawson

Assistant Managing Editor Online

Colin Ellis

Managing Editor Words

Andrea Hall

Assistant Managing Editor Words

Processing negative black and white film in your bathroom

Archivist — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:00:08 +0000

You don’t need a lot of money or the latest technology to make a good film. All you need are some chemicals, a light proof room (or one you can make light proof) and some patience.

Tools you’ll need:

3 plastic tubs at least 10 cm deep and about 40 x 30 cm to contain the chemicals, water and film during processing.

1 plastic funnel for mixing chemical (and only mixing chemicals!)

1 plastic pail for mixing chemicals

1 long plastic or wooden spoon for stirring chemicals

1 photographic safe light (optional)

3 or more plastic jugs for storing chemicals

Timer or clock

Rubber gloves

Dry line and clothespins so that you can hang your film to dry.

Chemicals you’ll need (these can be ordered online through Kodak; http://kodak.ca or through the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto; http://lift.ca)

Developer: D19

Fixer

Getting started:

Make sure the room you are using is light tight and well ventilated.

Put on your gloves. This is extremely important as these chemicals are volatile and can cause bad burns if they come into contact with skin.

Mix all your chemicals ahead of time so that they can cool to room temperature before you begin processing. When mixing chemicals, make sure you are using room temperature water. Set them up in your bathtub in an order that works best for you.

Ensure that you leave a bit of space between each chemical so that they don’t splash into one another.

Determine your development time using the stock information sheets for the type of film you used.

Set up your darkroom space and get a sense of where things are.

Make sure the lights are off, and take the film you will develop and pull out roughly a 30-foot strip. Put the remainder back into a light tight can.

Put the mass of film into the developer immediately. Gently work with the film in the developer – separating it and submerging it for two to three minutes, or however long the developer time is on your stock information sheet.

Lift out the film and place it in the water. Again, gently move and separate the film for one to three minutes.

After the wash, move your film directly into the fixer. The fixer clears the film and gets rid of its chemical by-products. Wash the film for about five minutes.

Once you are finished, turn the light on and separate your film and hang it to dry with the line and clothespins. As the film dries, go back and develop another 30 feet. Once it is dry, you can go and project it or reprint it. For a neat technique, try solarizing.

To solarize your film, mid-way through the development cycle flick your bathroom lights on and off several times, or use quick bursts from a flashlight. This causes a partial reversal of the tones in the negative and gives a stunning effect.

[cincopa AwFARnaCqh82]

Editor’s Note

Lawrence — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:13:17 +0000

A wise man named Homer J. Simpson once referred to television as “teacher, mother, and secret lover”. That kind of passion belies the mindset of those who work in both the television and film industries: those that love them, love them a lot.

Now, don’t mistake this for the callous love that one can have for a favourite sitcom or film. Being a film or television buff can no doubt involve passion and dedication, but not in the same way as those who have the urge to create and sculpt those shows and films. From the inception of ideas to casting, performing, filming, editing and every nuance in between: this magazine is for those who are bound to these industries by a love and absolute need to create.

This issue of Fine Cut exists to both inform and entertain on different levels. Inside, there are a wealth of practical stories about the technology that serves to give film and television crews the tools to advance their trade in new and innovative ways. Innovation comes from creators, and these new tools help push that creativity in ways not possible just a few scant years ago. There are also stories that speak to the cultural diversity of Canada, with exciting developments from coast to coast as well as Canadians abroad using their unique perspective to craft original and meaningful stories. The problems of an industry in rapid flux are also explored, through censorship, union values, and those who have been left behind during such a rapid technological rise.

At the end of the day, Fine Cut strives to show readers that what happens behind the scenes can be just as compelling, tumultuous and fun as what happens on screen.

Enjoy.

-Adam Carter, 2011