Former Winnipegger nominated for Emmy

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This article was published 18/07/2009 (5954 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a guy without cable who doesn’t watch television, Shawn Fedorchuk is pretty good at working for the industry.

The 36-year-old Winnipeg native is a senior editor and creative lead at Digital Kitchen in Seattle, a production company that works on everything from the opening sequences of series such as The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien to commercials.

When the list of Emmy nominees was released Thursday, Fedorchuk’s name was among them for his work as part of the team that created the opening sequence for the HBO series True Blood, starring another former Winnipegger, Anna Paquin, as a telepath who falls in love with a vampire.

"It’s bloody amazing, get it?" Fedorchuk says with a laugh over the phone from his Seattle office, where he just finished editing a commercial for Shark Week, Discovery Channel’s annual homage to all things shark.

"It sounds like a major cliché, but it’s nice to be recognized. Lots of people in the creative arts toil in obscurity; for me, it’s nice to be recognized and go to L.A. and have a night on the town and drink some champagne," he says.

Fedorchuk knows of what he speaks. His Emmy nod for outstanding main title design is his third nomination. He has been nominated for his work on the television show The Grid and the best supporting actor intro sequence for the 77th Academy Awards.

But this one might be the biggest, since he and his co-worker Rama Allen came up with the idea for the True Blood opening and were involved in the pitch to HBO. Fedorchuk’s pitch beat out 12 others from around the world, including competing plans from Digital Kitchen offices in New York and Chicago.

"I just feel really thankful I’m at one of the best companies in the world for doing main titles and to have an amazing team and infrastructure to pull off these massive creative efforts. It’s one of the best artistic creative freedoms in the world to have whatever thing that you’ve dreamt up as far as your original idea, then you get to go make it happen in real life, it’s not just a crazy sketch in a book," he says.

The title sequence involves location shots around Louisiana, where the show’s fictional town is located, and in a church where a Cajun woman is baptized.

Fedorchuk and his team are up against the opening title sequences from Lie to Me, Storymakers, United States of Tara and Taking Chance. There’s a good chance he and his crew could win, since Digital Kitchen already has Emmy statues for the opening credits of Six Feet Under and Dexter.

Fedorchuk can’t even begin to guess what his chances are.

"Believe it or not, I don’t even have cable. I don’t watch TV, so I’ve never seen any of them. I don’t even know what I’m up against," he says.

Fedorchuk has lived in Seattle for three years. He left Winnipeg — where he fronted the popular noise-rock trio Kittens — in 1998 and has spent time in Vancouver, Los Angeles, New York and Dallas.

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca