Made for smartphones, verticals are bringing much needed work to Hollywood North
Actor Nic Westaway's resumé has a notable thread running through it.
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'I think I've played 10 billionaires, maybe 12,' he said.
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Since last year, the Vancouver-based actor has been a sought-after star in the world of verticals, also known as micro-dramas. The Australian transplant, who did four seasons on the hit Australian soap opera Home and Away, has starred in 19 verticals in the last 1½ years.
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Meant to be watched on your phone, verticals are feature film-length stories typically broken down into 70 to 150 episodes of 60 to 90 seconds each.
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'It's this weird mash up. It's like, if Hallmark and telenovela had a throuple with a B movie is how I like to describe it,' said Vancouver actor Alicia Read, who has made 10 verticals to date. Read, along with a few others, has formed the Vertical Film & Short Series Alliance (www.thevfssa.org) to help TV Land film people navigate the exploding world of verticals.
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The stories are watched using vertically oriented apps such as ReelShort, FlickReels, DramaBox and GoodShort. Each platform usually offers between 10-20 free, cliffhanger-packed, episodes to hook the viewer. After that, it will cost you US$20 to US$40 to continue to view.
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'They know when people are clicking. They know how far they go in before they start to lose interest,' said Vancouver casting agent Monika Dalman, who notes she has lost count of the number of verticals projects she has worked on since 2023. Dalman's stopped counting after number 40. 'They know what specific cliffhangers are making people pay for the rest of it.'
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They also decide via data what the next scripts will be.
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'I'm all in on this sector,' said Jimmy Wu, a producer/cinematographer and founder of Vancouver production company Vertical film Vancouver/Section Cinema Inc., which has 20 vertical projects to its credit.
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An early adopter, Wu produced his first vertical in December 2023. For each project, Wu employs anywhere between 20 and 40 cast members, 95 per cent of whom are local.
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The way things typically work is a company reaches out to a producer and gives them a script from a previously produced project, most likely from an Asian market. It is then westernized.
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The plots lean toward revenge or rags-to-riches stories, with a soap opera/telenovela flavour. There are hidden identities, lost loves, unknown fortunes — and sometimes werewolves, vampires, and more billionaires than Mar-a-Lago's membership list. The narratives are big on dramatic gasps and slapping.
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CBC
9 hours ago
- CBC
How AI, robotics and late artist Morrisseau are helping fight art fraud
Social Sharing Famed Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau was browsing a Vancouver gallery with his longtime friend Cory Dingle around 1993 when a painting stopped them in their tracks. The pair asked who created it. The answer? "Norval Morrisseau." The trouble? The artist had never seen the work, let alone painted it. "We had a little chuckle and we left," Dingle recalled. "Then, I said, 'What do you want to do about this?' He said, 'You know, you can't police the world.'" Morrisseau, who died in 2007, was a self-taught, trailblazing artist known for his pictographic style and membership in the Indian Group of Seven. He was the first Indigenous artist to have his work shown in a contemporary gallery in Canada and now his paintings sell for millions. But the incident Dingle remembers proved to be an omen. At least 6,000 fake paintings have since been uncovered, costing Morrisseau's estate $100 million in losses. The phenomenon amounts to what police have called the biggest art fraud in world history. Canadian artist's estates thinking of leaving Canada, says Morisseau estate 2 years ago Finding fakes is time consuming work. It requires co-operation from galleries and private collectors, a trained, critical eye cast on anything purporting to be made by the late artist and the patience to keep pursuing justice through the court system. But now a new tool has emerged to help the battle: artificial intelligence. Bogged down by the enormity of the task at hand, Morrisseau's estate, which is run by Dingle, partnered with two art-loving professors to build software nicknamed "Norval AI" about three years ago. It can analyze art pieces and determine the probability that they're a genuine Morrisseau. "Because the fakes were so terrible ... we got to a point with our AI that it was so good at picking them out," Dingle said. "There was no problem." Yet the estate knew fakes were still out there. They were just getting harder to detect because court hearings were revealing the tell-tale signs of a fake Morrisseau — thinner paint lines, for example — which allowed fraudsters to make their works even more convincing. Enter Chloë Ryan. The then-engineering student loved making large-scale abstract paintings. Even though such works could sell for a decent amount, they often take weeks or months to create, narrowing the odds that she could make artistry a viable career. She could make prints of her pieces, but they just weren't the same because they lacked the texture of a real painting. The conundrum became a source of inspiration for Ryan, leading her to start tinkering with robots and paint on her Montreal balcony. She eventually developed Acrylic Robotics, a company that uses technology to paint pieces at the behest of an artist. The process starts with an artist painting with a stylus on a drawing table, which acts like a massive tablet. Amazon Web Services software analyzes and logs every movement, detecting millions of details in the piece, including the strokes, brush pressure, pigment and speed. "We like to think of AI as a powerful magnifying glass," said Patricia Nielsen, AWS Canada's head of digital transformation and AI. "It can detect those patterns and the anomalies that might be invisible to the human eye ... so art experts, historians, can dig in further." With that data, Acrylic's robotic arm can then paint a replica so precise, Ryan says it's indistinguishable from an original — exactly what Dingle needed to put Norval AI to the test. A mutual connection put him in touch with Ryan last August. Shortly after, they got to work. Because Morrisseau isn't alive to paint images on Ryan's tablet, Acrylic's robot (Dingle affectionately calls it Dodo) had a more complicated feat to accomplish. Dingle would send Ryan a hi-resolution image of one of Morrisseau's works. Acrylic Robotics would then have an artist learn about eccentricities of his style and paint the piece before Acrylic's robot would give it a try. Everything the robot painted was analyzed by the estate and Norval AI. The two sides have been going back and forth for about a year, picking out errors in the robot's execution and poring over new works. Early editions had several spots where both the estate and Norval AI could tell the robot had stopped a long stroke to pick up more paint — something uncharacteristic of Morrisseau. "If you look at one of our works randomly on the street, you wouldn't be able to say that's made by a robot, but we can't yet do all art under the sun because there's a lot of techniques that we haven't yet built in," Ryan said. "We can't use every tool in an artist's arsenal yet. If an artist is out here finger painting, obviously we can't do stuff like that." Concerns of harming artists Newer editions of the Morrisseaus are about 69 per cent accurate and expected to improve even more. But Dingle admits, "I have kind of been holding back on getting to 100 per cent." He's scared of developing anything too perfect before he and Acrylic Robotics have found a foolproof method for ensuring a Morrisseau recreation can't be passed off as the real thing. It's a concern Ryan shares. "The worst thing that could happen is that we release this without consultation with groups that have been harmed by art forgery and this technology is used against artists," she said. WATCH | Winnipeg Art Gallery painting part of Morrisseau fake investigation: Painting in Winnipeg Art Gallery collection part of investigation into Norval Morrisseau fakes 1 year ago A case investigators have called Canada's largest art fraud investigation has revealed one of thousands of paintings falsely attributed to renowned Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau was once on display in Winnipeg's biggest art gallery. They're currently exploring markings or other features that can be embedded in pieces to denote they're not originals. Once they settle on an ideal method, they'll have an avenue to disseminate recreations of Morrisseau's work — responsibly. While some might think that's the last thing an estate plagued by forgeries would want to do, Dingle sees it as a way to bring Morrisseau's work to the people who would value it most. "There's two schools named after Norval. There are healing institutions. There are academic institutions. There are remote Indigenous communities," said Dingle, sitting in front of a rarely-shown Morrisseau.
Winnipeg Free Press
11 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
New U of W project a crash course in classic and contemporary works
The University of Winnipeg is launching a first-of-its-kind course that will introduce undergraduate students to classics, religion and Indigenous studies all at once. Four academics will co-teach Introduction to the Humanities — an experimental project that's been five years in the making — this fall. 'This is pretty unique and special, and I think it has the potential to grow into quite the feather in U of W's cap,' said Alyson Brickey, an assistant professor in the department of English. The University of Winnipeg (Ruth Bonneville / Free Press files) Brickey, alongside colleagues in the faculty of arts — associate dean Brandon Christopher, associate professor Melissa Funke and professor Carlos Colorado — designed it together. They plan to take turns assigning famous texts in their respective research areas and delivering lectures to an inaugural cohort of 36. A variety of scholars with other areas of expertise are scheduled to make guest appearances to round out the comprehensive intro to the social sciences. The co-creators took inspiration from Halifax-based University of King's College. Students enrolled in its foundation year program on the East Coast spend all of their time reading and analyzing influential historic books, such as the Bible, Frankenstein and The Communist Manifesto. King's teaches this content in chronological order, but U of W will group lesson plans by theme: beginnings; self and community; love and desire; and endings. 'This might look like a 'great books' course — but in so far as it does, the four of us have been actively thinking about how the traditional canon has excluded important voices who have an awful lot to contribute to the study of big ideas,' said Colorado, a scholar of religion, politics and identity. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and Frederick Douglass's famous speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? are on the 2025-26 syllabus. It also features contemporary works, such as North End Love Songs, a 2011 collection from Winnipeg poet Katharena Vermette, and Kendrick Lamar's 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning album, To Pimp a Butterfly. The associate dean of arts said the setup will require students to both think critically about the lasting influence of historical texts and how modern-day interpretation changes their meaning. For Christopher, who researches Renaissance literature, what's most exciting about the new course is the opportunity to learn from his colleagues on a regular basis. It's rare to be able to sit in on a colleague's lecture, let alone teach alongside them, he noted. 'The way we teach things is often siloed, but nothing happens in a vacuum,' he said, adding that the interdisciplinary nature of the course will allow students to make connections between texts and disciplines, from rhetoric to philosophy. Brickey echoed those comments. She said their goal is to encourage more 'cross-pollination' among professors and students as they consider big questions about the history of human thought. Introduction to the Humanities was designed to be a first-year course spanning two semesters (MULT-1301 and MULT-1302) for a total of 12 credits. Registration is underway. As is standard in foundational humanities classes, there will be an emphasis on essay writing 101 and group presentations. Much of the allotted time will be spent in intimate tutorial settings. Tuesdays A weekly look at politics close to home and around the world. Funke called it 'the ultra U of W experience.' Students are going to get to know each other and four professors 'very well,' in addition to becoming anchored in the community on campus, said the researcher who is interested in Greek literature and gender and sexuality. There are 1,422 courses scheduled to run in 2025-26. Last year, four in 10 students at U of W were working towards an arts major of some kind. Roughly half of all pupils were in an arts classroom on the downtown campus at some point. Maggie MacintoshEducation reporter Maggie Macintosh reports on education for the Free Press. Originally from Hamilton, Ont., she first reported for the Free Press in 2017. Read more about Maggie. Funding for the Free Press education reporter comes from the Government of Canada through the Local Journalism Initiative. Every piece of reporting Maggie produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
CBC
18 hours ago
- CBC
Longtime CBC Vancouver weather forecaster Phil Reimer dies at 84
Social Sharing Longtime CBC weather forecaster Phil Reimer has died at the age of 84. Reimer worked at CBC News for more than two decades. He also worked at CKWX, CKNW and the Vancouver Sun. His children say Reimer died at Vancouver General Hospital on Wednesday surrounded by loved ones. Gloria Macarenko, host of CBC's On The Coast and Reimer's former on-air colleague, shared her condolences with his family. "Anyone who knew Phil will remember his warm smile, his countless stories, his never-ending projects and his constant optimism," she said. "I will certainly treasure memories of times that I spent with him and I will miss him dearly." Born in Winnipeg, Reimer left school in Grade 10 for an all-night disc jockey job at a radio station in Victoria. He worked as a sportscaster in Winnipeg, even playing in a CFL game with the city's Blue Bombers. "I just got beat up," he told the Vancouver Sun of his time as an embedded reporter. He spent part of the 1970s selling tours to Elvis Presley concerts, and returned to broadcasting following the singer's death in 1977. Ahead of his final weather report for CKNW in 2006, Reimer told the Vancouver Sun that he had delivered about 75,000 forecasts in his career. "How many people blame me for the weather? About the same amount," he joked. Reimer told the Sun that one of the jobs of a weather forecaster is to keep things simple. "You have to relate to your audience. Don't get too scientific," he said. "Weather is probably one of the most relevant parts of any newscast. It determines what people do for the next 24 hours." A little humour also helped.
