From Victoria Ahearn of The Canadian Press:
Link: After loss of shows like Schitt’s Creek, experts say CBC ‘needs more great Canadian storytelling’
Tuesday’s Canadian Screen Award nominations featured many gains for the CBC but also highlighted its massive losses. Continue reading.
From a media release:
The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television (the Canadian Academy) announced today the nominees for the 2021 Canadian Screen Awards in 141 film, television, and digital media categories. The awards will be presented as a seven-part genre-based series of presentations streamed live on Academy.ca — as well as the Canadian Academy Twitter and YouTube channels — from Monday, May 17, 2021, through Thursday, May 20, 2021.
The sixth and final season of Schitt’s Creek leads both the television and overall Canadian Screen Award nominations with 21, followed by Cardinal: Until The Night and Trickster with 15 nominations each. In film, Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum tops nominations with 10, while Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy sees nine and Charles Officer’s Akilla’s Escape eight. Bit Playas leads digital media nominations with six, Hey Lady! with five, and both Avocado Toast the series and Ghost BFF with four.
The ninth annual Canadian Screen Awards will be a showcase of the Canadian content that got us through a very precarious year, and will honour the creators who brought unique stories to our screens and into our lives. Each presentation will be narrated by a notable Canadian and will focus heavily on the nominated works. The awards will culminate in the Canadian Screen Awards main event — featuring a curated selection of prominent awards — streaming live on Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 8:00 PM ET. More details will be announced in the coming weeks.
The presentations will also honour the 2020 Special Award recipients, a group of eleven esteemed Canadians including Earle Grey Award recipient Tina Keeper, Radius Award (presented by MADE | NOUS) recipient Dan Levy, Lifetime Achievement Award recipient David Suzuki, and Academy Icon Award recipient Alex Trebek.
The schedule for the 2021 Canadian Screen Awards is as follows:
Monday, May 17
7:00 PM ET – Canadian Screen Awards – News & Documentary, Presented by CBC
8:00 PM ET – CTV presents the Canadian Screen Awards – Lifestyle & Reality
Tuesday, May 18
7:00 PM ET – Canadian Screen Awards – Children’s & Animation, Presented by Shaw Rocket Fund
8:00 PM ET – Canadian Screen Awards – Digital & Immersive, Presented with the participation of the Independent Production Fund
Wednesday, May 19
7:00 PM ET – CTV presents the Canadian Screen Awards – Creative Arts & Performance
Thursday, May 20
7:00 PM ET – Canadian Screen Awards – Cinematic Arts, Presented by Telefilm Canada, Supported by Cineplex
8:00 PM ET – Canadian Screen Awards
The 2021 nominations were chosen by members of the Canadian Academy and by nominating juries, conducted virtually with representatives from the film, television, and digital media industries. The membership will now cast their votes between Tuesday, March 30, 2021 and Friday, April 16, 2021 to determine the winners.
The 2021 Canadian Screen Awards for Sports will be handed out in July 2021, with nominees to be announced in June 2021.
For a full list of 2021 Canadian Screen Awards nominees, please visit Academy.ca/nominees.
Tell Tale Productions’ The BIG Downsize, Season 3 sees order meet chaos when professional organizer, Jane Veldhoven takes on two Nova Scotia households with too much stuff. The five-part documentary series premieres nationally on VisionTV, Monday, April 5 at 9 p.m. ET and runs until May 3.
Season 3 of The BIG Downsize, an exploration of why we love our possessions so much and the emotional baggage and stress that comes crashing down when there is no choice but to let go, sees Veldhoven helping freewheeling artist Doug Bamford prepare to move from a 3000-square-foot Victorian house in Lunenburg to an apartment and Dartmouth’s Sparks family downsize from their large family home to a much smaller one.
Host of this popular TV series, Veldhoven is the only Professional Organizer in Canada who is also a Certified Interior Decorator. An industry leader for the past 18 years, she has served on the National Board of Professional Organizers in Canada and is a founding member of the Nova Scotia Chapter. With a thriving business, Get Organized by Design, based in Halifax, Veldhoven is Past Chair of the Nova Scotia Interior Decorators’ Association and was a columnist with Herald Homes for 10 years. For more information on Veldhoven, visit: GetOrganizedByDesign.ca.
The BIG Downsize was produced by Edward Peill and Erin Oakes from Halifax’s award-winning Tell Tale Productions Inc., directed by Pamela Gallant, and written and story edited by Josh MacDonald. The series was produced in association with VisionTV with support from The Nova Scotia Film & TV Production Incentive and the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit program.
For more information on The BIG Downsize, visit: TheBIGDownsize.
Follow: #TheBIGDownsize #JaneVeldhoven #GetOrganizedByDesign
About Tell Tale Productions
Tell Tale Productions Inc. develops and produces one-off documentaries and non-scripted series that resonate with audiences and have long lasting global appeal. The company has produced award-winning content for the CBC, Documentary Channel, Discovery, History, ZoomerMedia, AMI, NDR, and Super Channel. Recent productions include Spirit Talker, Drag Kids, The Big Downsize, and The Power of Play. Tell Tale also acts as a service producer for numerous series including top rated History series The Curse of Oak Island. Our award-winning productions have been viewed by millions of people in more than 100 countries on dozens of broadcasters including ABC, Amazon Prime, Al Jazeera, France 5, HBO Europe, ORF, Red Bull, NHK, and YLE.
From a media release:
CBC is announcing initial details for two new original half-hour comedy series featuring Kim’s Convenience stars Andrew Phung and Nicole Power – RUN THE BURBS and STRAYS – with both shows set to launch during the upcoming 2021-22 broadcast season.
Created by comedian, writer and actor Andrew Phung and his best friend and collaborator, filmmaker Scott Townend (The Secret Marathon), RUN THE BURBS is a new original comedy about a young, bold Canadian family taking a different approach to living life to the fullest in the suburbs, featuring Phung as a stay-at-home dad with an entrepreneur wife and two kids. The series has been in development since May 2020 and is produced by Pier 21 Films, with additional details to be announced later this spring.
STRAYS follows the upbeat and enthusiastic Kim’s Convenience character Shannon Ross (Nicole Power) as she embarks on a new career in Hamilton, Ontario alongside an ensemble cast including Frank Cox O’Connell (Soulpepper Theatre), Tina Jung (Suits, Second Jen), Nikki Duval (Workin’ Moms), Kevin Vidal (Workin’ Moms), Tony Nappo (Pretty Hard Cases), Paula Boudreau (Workin’ Moms) and Emily Piggford (The Sounds, Warigami). Created by Kevin White (Kim’s Convenience, Schitt’s Creek) and produced by Thunderbird Entertainment, the series has been in development since July 2018 and is currently in production. More details will be announced later this spring.
“As our comedy slate continues to evolve, we are thrilled to continue working with Andrew and Nicole and offer audiences two new comedies to look forward to starring these incredible talents they have come to know and love,†said Sally Catto, General Manager, Entertainment, Factual and Sports, CBC. “Both of these series were planned to join Kim’s Convenience on our comedy lineup this upcoming year, to reflect how many young Canadians are forging new lives outside of urban centres in Canada. We look forward to watching Andrew and Nicole as they explore these new stories.â€
RUN THE BURBS and STRAYS join original comedy SORT OF as new additions to CBC’s award-winning comedy slate this upcoming broadcast season. Created by Bilal Baig (Acha Bacha) and Fab Filippo (Save Me), SORT OF stars Baig as a gender fluid millennial trying to live their most authentic life.
CBC will confirm series renewals and additional new original series for the 2021/22 broadcast season later this spring.
I like my horror/scary projects to be atmospheric. A jump scare is OK, but I prefer a general feeling of unease coupled with a tinge of a slow burn. It’s why I love Something Undone.
Debuting Friday on CBC Gem, Something Undone—created by and starring Madison Walsh and Michael Musi—manages what I thought was unthinkable: a genuinely spooky piece of work encapsulated in a six-episode web series.
And, it was written, produced and filmed during the pandemic. Created through funding from CBC’s Creative Relief Fund, which provided $2 million in development and production funding to a diverse range of original Canadian projects in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the CBC’s hook was projects had to be produced under strict COVID-19 guidelines.
“Mike and I started brainstorming,” says Walsh during a recent call. “We thought, ‘What can you maintain the quality and enjoyment of with restrictions on visuals? If we can’t have that many actors, what can we do? If we could only have one location, what could we do?’ That’s when we started to think about sound.” The result is Something Undone.
In the first episode we meet Jo (Walsh), a foley artist and her partner, Farid (Musi), who are the successful hosts of a Canadian true crime podcast. After her mother passes away Jo returns to her small Ontario town to sort through her mother’s things while continuing her foley work on the podcast. With Farid in Newfoundland and only available over the phone, a sense of desolation, loneliness, and unease begins to permeate Jo’s life. A disturbing sound Farid hears in one of Jo’s tracks leads her on a creepy, spooky path. Did the house, or something in it, cause her mother’s death?
“I was doing research about sound and learned that we, as human beings, perceive sound so realistically that we can make them up and hear them almost as if they were actually there,” Musi says. “I think that’s why watching a horror movie in our home is such an amazing experience. It doesn’t end when the movie ends. It stays with us.”
With strict safety guidelines in place early in 2020, Walsh and Musi headed off to write Something Undone in a spot many would consider a scary setting: a cottage in the middle of nowhere with no heat. There, they wrote for 10 days, fleshing out what they had established in the pilot into one big chunk and then found ways to break it up into six episodes with a cliffhanger for each.
And while you can certainly watch Something Undone on your TV via the CBC Gem app—the colour palette, visuals and set decoration are wonderful—watching it with headphones on my laptop revealed a whole other level to the horror. Every little creak and clatter can be heard.
“We spoke to our sound designer and he spent extra time really juicing the sound for direction and to make that audio experience with your headset,” Walsh says. “Because it is sound-based, yeah, go for your headphones.”
Something Undone debuts Friday on CBC Gem.
Images courtesy of 4AM Film Studios.
