Rainmaker makes Deluxe deal

On November 29, Rainmaker Entertainment announced that Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc. will purchase two of Rainmaker’s three postproduction facilities, Vancouver-based Rainmaker Visual Effects and Rainmaker Post, as well as its London, England, visual-effects facility, for a total of $31 million. About 175 Vancouver employees will be involved in the deal, plus a further 30 to 40 in London. The purchase excludes the Rainmaker Animation division in Vancouver, which employs 350 people.

Rainmaker CEO Warren Franklin explained by phone that the company wants to focus on animation. “One of our strategies has been that we want to really move into producing and owning our own content, and we made that decision about a year and a half ago,” he said. Rainmaker was originally established in 1993 as Mainframe Entertainment and is currently working on the feature film Escape From Planet Earth, as well as developing a 3-D feature-film trilogy of their TV series ReBoot.

“We felt as a service company, we just weren’t really big enough to compete with the bigger companies,” Franklin said. “We really wanted to put our resources on focusing on animation, because we felt it would have a much better return for the shareholders and ultimately it would build the most value and it would really help build the industry here in Vancouver.” In light of the strong Canadian dollar, Franklin also pointed out the need for the local industry to become more self-sustaining and less dependent on American productions: “I think we have to move away from just being a service-based business. The film and digital-content business here needs to move into ownership of our properties.”

Deluxe, an American provider of entertainment-industry services and technologies, has an international clientele as well as facilities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

The transaction is subject to approval by Heritage Canada and is expected to be completed by December 31.

> Craig Takeuchi

Global films top the mountain

Canada’s international outlook continues to reap rewards in cinema. At the seventh annual Whistler Film Festival, which ran from November 29 to December 2, Amal, a tale about an auto-rickshaw driver in New Delhi who inherits a billionaire’s estate, garnered the Bell Audience Award for best feature film. The movie, by first-time Canadian feature director Richie Mehta, beat runner-up Klunkerz by U.S. director Billy Savage.

The Directors Guild of Canada–B.C. District Council presented the $15,000 Borsos Award for best new Canadian feature film to Stéphane Lafleur’s black comedy Continental: A Film Without Guns. Rupinder Nagra (Amal?) and Maya Batten-Young (River?) also won $500 awards for best actor and best actress in the Borsos competition.

The $5,000 best-documentary award, presented by CBC Newsworld, went to Paul Taylor’s We Are Together (Thina Simunye?), about children at a South African orphanage.

Jeff Barnaby’s The Colony picked up the $1,000 best short film award, while Whistler Blackcomb presented the best mountain culture award to Mark Obenhaus’s film about extreme skiing, Steep.

Marshall Axani’s The Light of the Family Burnham won the inaugural Motion Picture Production Industry Association Short Film Award, which includes $15,000 in cash plus in-kind service contributions of up to $100,000. The prize was designed to help new B.C. filmmakers develop their careers. Four candidates—Cal Garingan, Katie Yu, Ryan Galletta, and Axani—participated in a pitch session on November 30 and were judged by a jury consisting of directors Carl Bessai, Lynne Stopkewich, and Trent Carlson.

In a phone interview, Carlson explained what gave Axani’s project an edge over the others: “There was something really clear that Marshall was trying to express with the film. He came across with really honest passion, and we felt like the award would, given where he is now, really have an impact on his career.”

> Craig Takeuchi