With partners The Banff Centre, Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, and l'Institut National de l'Image et du Son in Montreal, the Bell Globemedia Content Innovation Network’s five million dollar commitment to create new Canadian content for convergent media has begun paying dividends. Each institution has chosen a project, or projects, to mentor throughout the program on a yearly basis for the next five years.

Susan Kennard, Producer, Banff New Media Institute at The Banff Centre, says, "The combined effort of three of Canada's leading new media production and innovation centres will help define the face of digital Canadian content over the next five years. This network puts new resources, new funding sources and new strategies out there in the Canadian new media landscape, accessible to producers from coast to coast who want to develop convergent media projects."

The Banff Centre’s first project for the Bell Globemedia Content Innovation Network is Anxietyville. Created by Patrick Crowe and Thomas Wallner of Xenophile Media, Anxietyville is an episodic drama for television and the Web currently in co-production at the Banff New Media Institute. Part science-fiction, and part absurd comedy that reveals the hysterical, manic lives of a handful of urban antagonists linked together in a web of intrigue, neuroses, consumerism and technologically-accelerated paranoia. Anxietyville runs the gamut from video surveillance to true love, fast sex to finding the right brand of deodorant.

To read the original Banff Centre - Bell Globemedia release (April 10, 2001), click here