Category: media

The Toronto Film Festival is getting $400,000 from the Ontario government for “SARS relief.” With SARS scaring away visitors to the province, the government set up a fund to help out. “Previously, the ministry announced it was providing the Shaw and Stratford festivals a total of $800,000 in marketing assistance to help them overcome the effects of the SARS outbreak. The TIFF money has been used for campaign aimed at potential attendees in U.S. border states and Canada as well as producers and buyers in the U.S. and overseas.”

Now that the BBC is planning to make its archives available online for free, will the CBC do the same? “The CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, already has a section on its Web site that contains clips from historically significant radio and television broadcasts. The CBC Archive, active for more than a year, contains clips as varied as speeches from Prairie populist Tommy Douglas and Justin Trudeau’s eulogy at this father’s funeral.” But everything online? Not yet

Video games are already in the schools. Now they’re becoming subjects in schools. “Long the bane of professors who’d rather students do less game-console thumb-clicking and more schoolwork, video games are entering the curriculum and the realm of academic research – to the cheers of some and the boos of others. Indeed, ‘video game studies’ is an oxymoron to many faculty.”

The movie and record industries have long contended that, in order to get a handle on the digital piracy problem, they must be able to hold the companies who facilitate such piracy accountable for the actions of their users. Up to now, the courts have disagreed, but the industry has growing support from legal experts and copyright enforcement groups. The issue is a big one, since it would be relatively easy to sue the largest purveyors of file-trading software, and nigh onto impossible to go after individual users of the software.

The BBC says it will digitize all its content and make it available for free. Is this even technically possible? “Giving away the BBC’s content online is an eye-popping proposal, in part because it’s such an ambitious project. The BBC produces eight TV channels and 10 radio networks, and it broadcasts the news in 43 languages worldwide. It’s been doing television since 1936, and radio since 1922. How much of the Beeb’s voluminous output could it really put online? With today’s production software, digitizing the Beeb’s shows to disk as they air or uploading a copy of each segment separately as it’s produced would be easy. But what about the old shows?”

A new study reports that more adult women play video games than young boys. The average age of gamers has also risen to 29. “Video gaming traditionally has been seen as the province of teen boys locked in dark rooms, twitching away at game consoles. In recent years, however, the industry has worked to publish games catering to kids, women and older gamers.”

When Australia’s SBS TV was established, it was “an indulgence by the Fraser government and, some say, a sop to the growing electoral power of Australia’s ethnic communities. But SBS was a world-first idea that, for relatively few taxpayer dollars, managed to deliver reasonable value for money. It was never expected to be a ratings leader, but after 25 years it seems to be treading water. With 3.5 per cent of the night-time audience in Melbourne in the week before last – the most recent week for which complete audience statistics are available – it is not doing well.”

“In the movie world, writers are rarely treated with respect. Far from being considered sacred text, their words are routinely trampled on through endless script drafts, rewrites and ‘final polishes.'” But at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, an astonishing number of well-known authors and novelists are among the list of screenwriters, and Martin Knelman hopes that the star power of such writers as Barbara Gowdy and Mordecai Richler will lead to a sea change in the way the film world views the people who write the scripts.

The recent explosion of gay-themed programming on American TV has been well-chronicled, but not everyone in the gay community is happy about it. While media visibility is certainly something gays have long sought, shows like Bravo’s much-hyped Queer Eye For The Straight Guy are little more than stereotype-laden “gay minstrel shows,” according to Christopher Kelly. “Nearly a decade after television’s representations of gay life finally started moving in provocative directions – on shows like L.A. Law, thirtysomething and Roseanne – we are back at square one. Or square zero. There are now virtually no complex, gay people on television, and the future looks none too promising.”

Hollywood is getting out of the hand-drawn animation business, in favor of creating animated features on computers. “The new Hollywood truism is that Bambi is dead. That kids, hooked on the wizardry of 3D computer games, no longer want to watch quaint old-fashioned characters against painted backdrops.” Except… outside Hollywood, traditional animation seems to be thriving?