From Tony Wong of The Toronto Star:
The war for the business television viewer
Bloomberg Television Canada will launch sometime in the summer of 2015 and it promises to create waves in a competitive area where the stakes are high for an elite viewership that can move markets.
It is also a rare sign of expansion in a moribund industry: executives say they hope to hire up to 50 more journalists and producers for the channel when it is up and running. Continue reading.
Ken Girotti has directed some of the most critically acclaimed—and entertaining—television shows in recent years. In the U.S., he’s worked on Denis Leary’s firefighter drama Rescue Me, Dick Wolf’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent and spy drama Covert Affairs.
In Canada, the homegrown man behind the lens has worked on Combat Hospital, Flashpoint, the Stargate franchise, ReGenesis, Copper, Bomb Girls, Orphan Black and Saving Hope.
Girotti’s work can currently be seen on History’s sweeping Vikings, tracking the ongoing adventures of Ragnar Lothbrok and his followers as they explore the ancient world, and includes an attack on Paris later this season. We spoke the veteran director about the challenges and rewards of working on a series like Vikings, which involves filming longboats on rough seas and choreographing intense battle scenes for the small screen.
Vikings is a really cinematic series that deserves to be on a feature film screen.
Ken Girotti: I have to agree with you. The scope and scale of the show looks pretty good up there.
Are you the type of director who can just watch you work afterwards and enjoy it, or are you picking things apart?
Oh no, I play director. It never stops with me. It’s either, ‘Wow, that worked out really well,’ or ‘Oh my god, how could they have done that?’ or a mixture of those things. That’s part of the deal when you’re in television.
When you get a script from Vikings creator Michael Hirst, what is the first thing that you do? Walk me through the process.
The first thing I do is sit back and have a good read and see how it all washes over me. Almost always with any script—whether it’s from Michael Hirst or anyone—you’ll have questions about what exactly some things mean. And sometimes you never ask those questions because you want them to remain questions. Then I take a second read and try to fine-tune the script and put it through a filter. Are things clear? I’m starting to circle a place where I see the story unfold in my mind in pictures and words. That’s when the real job of directing begins because I start to interpret what Michael has written for me and try to embellish it and move it forward.
Directing is such a collaborative process. You have your vision and you’re getting into someone else’s sandbox. Is that sometimes a challenge?
On something like Vikings it’s pretty easy because I share a sensibility with Michael. I feel like we have a commonality in the way that we approach life and truth, beauty and art and all of those things. I have a deep respect for his writing; he writes in such an evocative way that speaks to me personally. There are some things that I become completely obsessed with. One little line.
One of the things that I never really observed about Vikings before is the exploration into religion.
I think it’s very subversive. It’s never on the surface. There’s slashing with axes and stuff, but everything that they do has an effect on the next thing that they do. And that’s very existential, I think.
Filming those longboats must be a challenge.
They are the most difficult things to manage ever. They’re difficult and annoying and beautiful all at once. You think about moving a camera while moving an actor on dry land and camera goes this way and the actor goes that way in a nice little coordination of movement. Then you add an element where you can’t predict where anything is going to go and that’s water. It creates organizational anarchy. The marine guys are amazing and my first AD, Raymond Kirk, is truly an amazing first AD. They had to build docks for these boats. They hoist them in with cranes. It’s immense and the logistical challenges with regard to the boats is just huge.
The battle scenes are intricate work too. I’m thinking of that battle in Episode 1 of this season.
We were on that site for six days, I think. It was a pretty big sequence. What we tried to show there was sort of a storming the beaches at D-Day. There was something similar earlier in the series where Jarl Borg rolls up on Kattegat. This was quite a bit bigger and we tried to stay on the beach for as long as we could and we wanted to show how hard it was to get your feet out of the water as a Viking and fight against those Mercians.
I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be a Mercian and see these big, ugly, hairy guys with axes on boats rowing towards you. It must have been horrible.
Vikings airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on History.
(Image credit: G. Pimentel)
Acceptance of others is a common theme in family programming, but The Stanley Dynamic certainly breaks new ground in the way it’s done. Debuting Thursday at 7:30 p.m. ET/PT on YTV, the live action series boasts a two-dimensional star: Luke Stanley, an animated 14-year-old who interacts with his three-dimensional family and world.
“This is a gentle nod to inclusion, diversity and acceptance,” says Michael Souther, co-founder of Amaze Film + Television, the show’s production company. “No one bats an eye at Luke. He is one of the family, he’s at school, he has crushes, but he’s different. And no one focuses on his difference.” At least, not in a negative way. There are plenty of positives to having an animated kid around: his twin brother, Larry (Charles Vandervaart, Murdoch Mysteries), appreciates the fact his sibling can stretch out his arms to reach the cookie jar on a faraway shelf.
Amaze is most recently known for producing four seasons of the ribald, adult comedy Call Me Fitz. Souther says he was interested in creating a family show that was different from everything already in the genre. They quickly settled on a new approach, combining animation with live action in a multi-camera series. With co-creator Ken Cuperus (Mr. Young) on board, Souther says the 26-episode first season is consistently entertaining.
It hasn’t been easy from a production standpoint. Taylor Abrahamse (Beyblade: Metal Fusion), who voices Luke, rehearsed and did initial takes with his TV family—cartoonist dad, Lane, (Michael Barbuto, Banner 4th of July), who chronicles the family’s adventures in his online comic strip, “The Stanley Dynamicâ€; mom Lisa (Kate Hewlett (Remedy); Larry; and bug-obsessed, genius sister Lori (Madison Ferguson)—before stepping off-stage during real takes. The next process involved inserting Luke’s action into scenes—in Thursday’s debut he squishes himself into a high school locker and is squeezed in a group hug—a time-consuming gig that is keeping Cuperus busy long after cameras stopped rolling.
The result is astounding:Â Luke has shadows behind him, makes eye contact with his co-stars and fits seamlessly into the world around him. Just like he’s supposed to.
The Stanley Dynamic airs Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. ET/PT on YTV.
From Michael Geist:
Beware of the Scare Tactics: CRTC To Announce Pick-And-Pay TV Today
The specifics are yet to come, but the CRTC will likely require distributors to offer a basic service of Canadian and mandatory channels at a relatively low price (a 2014 working document suggested a cap of between $20 – $30/month), offer consumers a pick-and-pay option, and adjust the Canadian content requirement for bundles.
Consumers will emerge as the clear winners, benefiting from increased choice and the potential to lower their monthly bills. Yet the CRTC decision will undoubtedly be greeted by doomsayers who will argue that pick-and-pay will increase prices and decrease choice (because some channels will fold). Continue reading.
My Toronto backyard is a playground for songbirds. We have a resident cardinal and his mate that have claimed our property as theirs. Robins, sparrows, chickadees and crows land on the lawn in droves. We’ve had woodpeckers on our dying tree in the back, and goldfinches in the flowers out front.
But we’re on the verge of losing our birds forever. That’s what SongbirdSOS—part of Thursday’s episode of The Nature of Things—posits. As York University’s Dr. Bridget Stutchbury says, species of birds still exist, but their numbers are way down. The wood thrush population in the Americas is down 62 per cent since 1966; the Baltimore Oriole is down over 45 per cent; the Bobolink has seen a 64 per cent decline. The question is, why?
Beautifully shot, SongbirdSOS suggests a few sobering answers. Mankind’s creation of artificial light has messed with the birds’ ability to migrate during the night, disorienting them and causing midair collisions. And, of course, we’ve constructed huge skyscrapers that songbirds fly into, a point driven home by FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program) Canada when they lay out the bodies of hundreds of dead birds on a plain white sheet for all to see. Lost breeding and wintering habitats in rain forests, wetlands and boreal forests, oil pipelines and farm pesticides are contributing to declining song bird numbers, as well as house cats.
On the positive side, there are steps being taken to halt the dropping populations, including allowing birds to feast on hurtful insects in Costa Rican coffee fields and mandating building owners to switch off the lights at night. Hopefully enough changes will come in time to save the songbirds before their tunes cease.
The Nature of Things airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on CBC.
