Malcolm Parry’s Trade Talk
Emily Carr grads have a shot at an Oscar nomination with their 12- minute take, Wild Life, while previous winners start on new project
City animators David Fine and Alison Snowden may soon have a second Oscar to aim for.
AS THEY WERE: Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby may leave Hollywood’s Kodak Theater stage Feb. 26 clutching a golden statuette. The Emily Carr College University graduates’ National Film Board production of Wild Life is still in contention for an Academy Award. It’s a 12- minute animated film about a 1909 English remittance man in Alberta, where Forbis and Tilby reside.
On Vancouver’s west side meanwhile, thrice- nominated David Fine and Alison Snowden already have an Oscar. The graduates of Britain’s National Film and Television School won it in 1994 for Bob’s Birthday, an animated short they co- produced with Channel 4 Television in Britain and the National Film Board of Canada. It spawned a same- title TV series that was so popular on the Global and Comedy networks, Torontoborn Fine and Nottingham native Snowden moved the series’ locale — and themselves — to Canada. Hits must keep coming, of course, so the 1984- married duo’s home- based studio ( snowdenfine. com) turned out 52 episodes of Bob and Margaret series for YTV and, with city- based Studio B Productions, the Ricky Sprocket – Showbiz Boy series for Teletoon.
“Short films went on the back burner — in fact, the cupboard,” Fine said this week, adding that even a 12- minute opus takes two years to produce. But the cupboard door creaked ajar during August’s computer- graphics SIGGRAPH conference, when NFB animation producer Michael Fukushima showed interest in another short.
“It’s nice to focus on one idea again,” Snowden said of the comedy about a group- therapy session the two proposed. If the NFB green- lights it, they’ll apply computer technology to classic animation but without the smeared ink, Newton’s- ring distortions and other bugbears of optical image recording.
“She’ll do more of the original design,” Fine said. “And he’ll figure out how to make it work,” Snowden interjected.
Chuckling at the old- married- couple interchange, Fine said: “We are an old married couple. I meet a lot of people who say, ‘ I couldn’t work with my wife or husband.’ But we met at film school, so we were working together beforehand.”
“And we do enjoy it,” Snowden said, making one wonder what they’ll draw on for a group- therapy script.
As for the possibility of another Oscar, Fine recalled an animated Bugs Bunny announcing his and the equally down- to- earth Snowden’s 1994 win. Climbing to the stage: “Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tom Hanks clapping and smiling in the front row. I thought: ‘ Is there something else going on here?’”
• TEAMING UP: Why would 40 University of B. C. MBA students accept an impossible grade rating of a 6.7 out of 6? Then again, why would judges award it? Hit www. youtube. com/ watch? v= mztpbgqdhoi for the answer. That lip- dub performance got the Sauder School of Business off to a rip- roaring start when 19 Canadian teams competed in the MBA Games tournament on the University of Alberta’s Edmonton campus recently.
In final results, the Sauder team placed third to Mcmaster’s Degroote and York’s Schulich biz schools. Cocaptains Ken Harris and Ivan Pienaar are determined to win next year in Hamilton. That’ll be tough as Sauder’s MBA course takes a mere 16 months, compared to two or three years elsewhere. Still, even from a cold start in mid- October, the two had 60 aspirants to choose from. According to South Africa- born Pienaar: “We said, ‘ Whatever you came here to do in an MBA, you will be able to do at the games, and have an opportunity to win.’”
“It’s a microcosm of the entire program,” said Harris, who left Chicago in order to climb mountains while studying.
You’d expect a wide view from an Ottawa native who played Aussie- rules football on Canada’s national team. “Sauder is an elite school,” Graeme Millen said. “It should be competing at a very high level. When we see these Ivy League schools — Western, U of T, Mcgill — we want to start not with them, but above them.” In fact, those squads placed 15th, 6th and 16th overall.
“A lot of MBA students got a reputation as alpha males,” Millen said, as Pienaar prepared to backflip from a 2.7- metre- high wall. “Women weren’t usually seen in the equation. But when you put all those people together” — former international fashion model Sonya Durante made her water polo debut at the games — “it erodes all stereotypes. I believe our class will come out of the program with a level of passion, cohesion and enthusiasm that Sauder [ school] has never seen before.”
Until next year, anyway.
• BILL & BOB: Two names are indelibly linked to the Sauder School of Business and UBC’S future. The first belongs to late International Forest Products chairman and two- term UBC chancellor William L. Sauder, who preferred to be called Bill and donated $ 20 million to the school in 2003. Three years later, he gave newly enrolled MBA students a vital lesson in business- management basics. “You’re always selling,” he said, adding that now- trendy “entrepreneurs” don’t always phrase it so baldly. “But that’s how it is.”
Kirk Henderson, CA, former 14- year vice- chair of Jimmy Pattison’s enterprises, recalled the informal MBA he earned working for 1920s- founded Sauder Industries: “[ Bill] gave me the opportunity to run a company hands- on so I could understand the business from the ground up. He taught me that the fundamentals of business are all the same, and it’s the product line you have to learn, whether it’s bums on the seats, heads of lettuce on the shelf, or lumber in the yard.”
Another name appears on the Sauder school’s 40,000- square- foot graduate school wall. It’s Robert H. Lee, better known as Bob, who donated $ 5 million in 2006. The former UBC chancellor and continuing Prospero Realty International chair’s bigger contribution to the varsity may eventually total $ 2 billion. That would be from the endowment- lands development scheme the 1960 grad proposed to fellow governors in 1984 with: “I’m not really an academic person, but I do know a little about real estate.”
Lee expanded that knowledge after joining Peter Wall and Peter Redekop in 1966 at what became Wall Financial Corp. Wall’s promise of a profitable partnership sure panned out. In 2002, Spectrum Management owner William Ng remembered Lee developing West Broadway’s Centennial hotel 30 years earlier. “You were just starting to make money then,” Ng said to the chap who has brokered an estimated $ 1- billion- worth of real- estate deals. “And now you’re printing it.”