From Jim Moodie of The Sudbury Star:
Link: Letterkenny’s love affair with Sudbury
“Blocking, quiet please,” says Megan Banning, first AD.
She’s standing at the open door of a barn near Hanmer, where Letterkenny, a cheeky bumpkin comedy airing on CraveTV, is shooting a scene for its second season.
Actors Jared Keeso, Nate Dales and K. Trevor Wilson are seated inside the barn on lawn chairs, rehearsing lines, with bottles of Puppers Premium Lager (7.2% alcohol) close at hand. Continue reading.Â
From a media release:
Cottage Life, a Blue Ant Media multi-platform brand that celebrates weekend living, is heading into summer with a lineup of new series that showcase fascinating animal stories and breathtaking retreats, as well as exclusive new online videos and its first-ever virtual reality shorts, featuring the Brojects.
Beginning Monday, July 4, the channel will premiere What on Earth? that gives viewers unique viewpoints of the natural world. Wednesday, July 6 will see the debut of the highly anticipated Season 7 of Hope For Wildlife, which follows the day-to-day operations of a non-profit wildlife refuge in Nova Scotia. Continuing the wildlife theme on Wednesdays, the series will be followed by Vet on the Hill and David Attenborough’s Natural Curiousities. Rounding out the schedule, viewers will get their weekend fix of stunning vacation homes beginning July 9, with new installments of series starring fan-favourite hosts like Charlie Luxton and George Clarke, as well as a new real estate series, Home of the Year. Additionally, audiences will be able to watch full episodes and webisodes of fan-favourite Cottage Life series, including Cabin Pressure and Brojects: In The House on CottageLife.com.
Hope For Wildlife (New Season, Canadian Premiere) begins its highly anticipated Season 7 on Wednesday, July 6 at 8 p.m. ET/PT. In this new season, the harshest Atlantic winter in a century challenges the staff at the Hope for Wildlife rehabilitation centre as they’ve never been tested. Construction on an expanded care facility for the centres resumes, but the melting snow reveals more orphaned and injured animals than the staff has ever encountered. Watch as Hope Swinimer, maintaining her signature optimism, inspires her crew to care for more than 3,000 animals — including more white-tailed deer than the sanctuary can hold — in a truly remarkable year of contrast and change.
New Online Videos
CottageLife.com is debuting its first-ever virtual reality videos, in which Brojects fans will be treated to new videos with 360-degree footage that complement the exclusive Brojects: In The House mini-build webisodes. Each video features a one- to three-minute scene related to key moments in the zany webisodes that gives viewers a 360-degree vantage point. The 360 videos can be found at CottageLife.com/video and can be viewed on desktop or smartphone. For a truly immersive virtual reality experience that puts viewers in the house with the brojects themselves, fans can visit brojects.tv for information on downloading the Brojects VR app and obtaining a Brojects Google cardboard viewer.
Over the summer, Cottagelife.com will also roll out five new short videos a week as part of its popular original web series that feature helpful bite-size tips, essential how-to tutorials, useful advice from Cottage Life Editor, Michelle Kelly and beautiful lakeside moments. Some of the videos set to debut this summer will include the basics for cooking a great steak, a DIY ice cream treat to impress guests and a look at unique locations in Canada. The site will also allow audiences to catch up on full episodes of new series such as Hope For Wildlife, which will join full episodes of fan favourites including Colin & Justin’s Cabin Pressure and Brojects: In The House. Audiences will find Cottage Life’s complete library of new and pre-existing online videos and webisodes at cottagelife.com/video.
Cottage Life is a Blue Ant Media multi-platform brand, celebrating the people, activities and places that make leisure time special. Exclusive content covers real estate, food, DIY projects and much more. Both informative and entertaining, no one captures the essence of weekend living like this. tv.cottagelife.com
Kate Drummond appears as the Agent Lucado in Wynonna Earp, the television series about a modern day gunslinger and paranormal crime fighting. The show has an exclusively Canadian cast and crew, and airs on Syfy in the United States every Friday and CHCH in Canada on Mondays.
Kate also stars as the driven and intimidating biomedical engineer Dr. Jessica Kandel in Ubisoft’s latest video game Tom Clancy’s The Division, which broke multiple Ubisoft sales records in its first 24 hours with more than one million copies of the game sold. She also starred in the main role of Anna Grimsdottir in Ubisoft’s internationally acclaimed video game Splinter Cell: Blacklist.
Kate is a former elementary school teacher of over a decade who switched careers late in life and is an advocate for people following their dreams like she has. (Image courtesy of Farrah Aviva Photography.)
Listen or download below, or subscribe via iTunes or any other podcast catcher with the TV, eh? podcast feed.
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From a media release:
In a ground-breaking addition to its Heritage Minute collection, Historica Canada is releasing a pair of new Minutes that explore vital moments in Indigenous history: treaty-making and residential schools. The Minutes highlight darker chapters of Canadian history and come a year after the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“If Canada is going to move towards reconciliation then we have to engage in some hard truths about residential schools and treaties,” said Shane Belcourt, director of the two Minutes. “We had so much to say about the issues but only one minute. My hope is these Minutes lend themselves to a larger dialogue.”
“Chanie Wenjack” tells the story of a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy who ran away from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in 1966. Wenjack (known as Chanie to his family, but historically as Charlie) died shortly into his journey. His death sparked the first inquiry into the conditions faced by residential school students. Wenjack’s sister, Pearl Achneepineskum, herself a survivor of residential school, shares the story in her own voice.
“Naskumituwin (Treaty)” tells the story of the signing of Treaty 9 through the eyes of a historical witness, George Spence. Spence, an 18-year-old Cree from Albany, James Bay, witnessed the treaty signing at Fort Albany on August 3, 1905. In the oral history tradition, Spence passed the story of the treaty signing down through his family. His great-granddaughter, Rosary Spence, shares the story as she inherited it.
The Heritage Minutes were produced by Historica Canada and Toronto-based Wabunganung Film Company Ltd. They were written by acclaimed author Joseph Boyden. Boyden and filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin provide the iconic end narration for “Wenjack” and “Treaty”, respectively. Additional educational materials for teachers are available here and here.
These Heritage Minutes were made possible through funding from the Ontario government. Historica Canada thanks Porter Airlines for its generous donation of travel vouchers for this project.
From a media release:
Halfire Entertainment, CBC and Netflix announced that production will begin on Alias Grace, a six-hour miniseries inspired by the historical true story of convicted murderer Grace Marks and based on the award-winning novel by Margaret Atwood. The miniseries is being written and produced by Sarah Polley (Looking for Alaska, Take this Waltz, Away from Her) and will be directed by Mary Harron (American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol), with production scheduled to begin in Ontario in August 2016. Alias Grace will be broadcast in Canada on CBC and will stream everywhere globally on Netflix.
The story of Alias Grace follows Grace Marks, a poor, young Irish immigrant and domestic servant in Upper Canada who, along with stable hand James McDermott, was convicted of the brutal murders of their employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, in 1843. James was hanged while Grace was sentenced to life imprisonment. Grace became one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of 1840s Canada for her supposed role in the sensational double murder, and was eventually exonerated after 30 years in jail. Her conviction was controversial, and sparked much debate about whether Grace was actually involved in the murder, or merely an unwitting accessory.
Both the screen adaptation and the Margaret Atwood novel on which the miniseries is based, introduce a fictional young doctor named Simon Jordan who researches the case and begins to fall in love with Grace. He soon becomes obsessed with her as he seeks to reconcile his perception of the mild-mannered woman he sees with the savage murder of which she has been convicted.
Alias Grace will be broadcast in Canada on CBC and stream globally on Netflix. Executive producers will be Sarah Polley, Mary Harron and Noreen Halpern (Aftermath, Working the Engels, Rookie Blue). Co-producing alongside Polley will be D.J. Carson (Spotlight). Polley was nominated for an adapted screenplay Academy Award for the 2006 drama Away from Her, which was adapted from the Alice Munro short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain.
Published in 1996, Alias Grace was awarded the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Additional books by Atwood that have been adapted for film and television include The Handmaid’s Tale, Payback, The Robber Bride, The Sin Eater and Surfacing. Kids’ CBC recently greenlit an animated series based on Atwood’s children’s book The Wide World of Wandering Wenda.
