Ready to roll

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This article was published 04/06/2020 (2250 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Since film production ground to a halt in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many are talking about how the production machine may click back into gear following the provincial edict allowing film production as of June 1.

But here’s a little secret. In some quarters of Winnipeg’s film industry, production never stopped.

“Being in a digital business does help in that respect,” says Ken Zorniak, president and CEO of Tangent Animation. In mid-March, when it became clear stay-at-home orders would be coming in response to the pandemic, Tangent was working on two different animated feature films for Netflix. (Zorniak can’t describe the content of the films, but a useful template may be their 2018 Netflix offering, NextGen, a kid-friendly feature in which a girl teams with a runaway robot to stop a megalomaniac bent on world domination.)

Zorniak, one of the co-founders of Frantic Films when it was primarily a visual effects house, says Tangent saw the writing on the wall early, which allowed the company to send nearly 300 of its employees to work from home.

“We’d been researching this for a while and we saw the potential and we had testing going on already,” Zorniak says. “So when we saw the inevitability of where this was going to be going, we started building a tactic plan on how we could transition the office to a home environment.

“We had 280 people we transitioned out of the office,” Zorniak says, including 100 in the Winnipeg office of Tangent and 180 in the Toronto office. “So you’re looking at 280 connections back to the office and everyone has their own flavour of home internet that they are using, so you have to kind of analyze what your solution is and understand where the problems are and try and address them as you go.

“We had already been kind of thinking of going in this direction,” Zorniak says, adding there are no plans to bring the staff back to Tangent’s Exchange District offices.

“Why risk people on public transport and all that other stuff, only to have everyone in the office be exposed?” Zorniak says. “We would have to shut down again.

“There’s really no benefit to that if people are having a quality of life and they’re happy with being at home,” he says. “It makes it that much easier to make that call.

“It’s been a challenge,” Zorniak says. “But the other part of working from home that has been successful has been the fact that everyone has been exposed to the same challenge.

Zorniak says Tangent is scheduled to deliver the first of the two animated features next year.

“We feel obliged to work at 100 per cent quota because Netflix has been helpful in allowing us to let quotas fly for a couple of months so we could get back on track,” he says. “It’s been a very positive relationship, honestly. They’ve been very kind of accommodating and helpful and caring.

“There are things that I’ve heard from Netflix but I never thought I would hear from a studio,” he says. “They were very concerned about the health of our team and wanted to make sure everyone was feeling good so they were willing to be accommodating, which is great.”

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Earlier this week, local production company Farpoint Films put out a casting announcement for “Non-Union African-Canadians for upcoming projects.”

Farpoint is working on a TV series for the American cable networks Bounce and Court TV on a real crime. Titled Dying to Be Famous: The Ryan Singleton Mystery, the show examines the case of Singleton, an aspiring model whose body was discovered in the Mojave Desert, minus many of his internal organs, in 2013.

Farpoint’s co-founder and executive producer Kyle Bornais says the series, consisting of six one-hour episodes, represents an attempt to solve the mystery. And that investigation — as well as some of the filming — took place during the lockdown.

“We did some interviews in Atlanta with Ryan’s mother and family and friends,” he says. “We’ve been shooting it for a while. It went on hiatus when everything happened but we started up again.”

“We actually started up during the pandemic, because you can shoot in the states,” Bornais says. “(Farpoint co-founder) John Barnard directed via Zoom.”

Farpoint is planning to shoot two weeks of dramatic recreations in two to three weeks, the reason for the casting call.

“It’s set all over the U.S. He was found in the Mojave Desert after his body was found after he went missing for seven or eight days,” he says, adding the story also takes place in Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles.

“So Manitoba is going to be playing for a lot of these major U.S. cities.”

The theme of the show feels especially topical, Bornais says.

“Ryan Singleton was a young black man who was murdered, we think, and the police never really did anything,” he says. “We are trying to solve the crime and we hired investigators in the U.S. to look into it.

“One of the theories is that it was a race murder, but nobody knows yet,” Bornais says. “We’re still in research stage. Certainly race feels like it could be one of the underlying factors in why he was killed and why the case was never really fully solved properly.”

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Farpoint also managed to shoot the final footage for their TV series Ice Vikings, about commercial fishing in Gimli, right up to the shutdown, giving them the opportunity to do post-production.

“I set up all our editors with home edit suites,” he says. “We’ve been heavily in post on Ice Vikings and we delivered 13 episodes of a series called The Day My Job Tried to Kill Me for the U.K. market in the middle of the pandemic.”

The latter series is about workplace disasters in which survivors describe “the day that their workplace turned into a living hell,” according to the promotional material.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing