#postproduction and more.” Other credits are also available to production companies as well. This city has made itself number one in moviema

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De Niro and Netflix Bet That New York Can Be a New Hollywood

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Steiner Studios opened along the Brooklyn waterfront in 2004 as the largest film studio outside Hollywood. Television and movie productions had fled New York City for cheaper locations, and the new studio was trying to ignite a turnaround.

Nearly 15 years later, the industry has exploded.

Steiner, which started with five sound stages and one movie in production, now has 30 stages, a back lot about to start construction and multiple shows and movies filming simultaneously. In Queens, Silvercup Studios has added two new production outposts, including one in the Bronx.

And several weeks ago, Netflix announced a significant expansion in New York, creating a new corporate office in Manhattan and a production hub in Brooklyn with sound stages to feed its booming streaming service.

Now the actor Robert De Niro is jumping on board. A group of investors, including Mr. De Niro and his son, Raphael, are buying a five-acre parcel in Astoria, Queens, with plans to build a sprawling production and film studio.

The studio, which will be called Wildflower Studios, aims to grab a piece of the surging television and movie business that is turning New York City, once the film capital of the world, into a new Hollywood.

Propelled by a soaring demand for original streaming content and a generous state tax incentive program, New York has become an entertainment powerhouse, attracting major feature films and award-winning television shows.

Last year, 332 movies were filmed in New York City, officials said. In 1980, there were 121.

Films and shows have spent nearly $2 billion so far this year in New York State, nearly surpassing the $2.1 billion spent for all of 2013.

Since the beginning of film, producers have used the city as a backdrop, filling commercials, films and television shows with scenes of the soaring Manhattan skyline, the iconic Brooklyn Bridge and the majestic Statue of Liberty.

Everything else involved in the production process, however, was typically done elsewhere.

But at least four major studios now operate in the city, returning New York to its roots as a production nexus, similar to the 1920s and ’30s before Hollywood took over.

“Whether it’s in film, TV, augmented and virtual reality, or gaming, there is an exploding opportunity to tell stories to people across the globe,” said Adam Gordon, an investor in the Astoria film studio and the president of Wildflower. “The demand for original content creation is exploding, and with its talent pool and creative energy New York City is a natural home to that evolution.”

Wildflower expects to spend roughly $400 million to buy the property in Queens and to build a nearly 600,000-square-foot facility designed as a one-stop shop for movies and television shows, offering space for everything from preproduction to postproduction services. A spokesman for Wildflower Studios said Mr. De Niro was not available to comment for this article.

The site is part of a larger strip in Astoria that has long been owned by Steinway & Sons, the renowned piano manufacturer. The parcel that Wildflower is buying has been used as storage for finished pianos, Steinway said. The sale will not disrupt manufacturing, the company said.

Mr. Gordon said he and Robert De Niro conceived of Wildflower Studios after discussing the state of film studios in New York City and in other places where Mr. De Niro had made films.

“We toured studios in New York, on the West Coast and in the South to understand the landscape of current filming spaces,” Mr. Gordon said. “We saw the need for a true destination film campus.”

Besides movies, the number of television shows made in New York is also increasing significantly. Over the past year, 67 television shows were shot in the city, an increase from 29 during the 2013-14 season, officials at the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment said.

“We are thrilled by this growth because it means more jobs and opportunities for New Yorkers in a thriving creative economy,” said Anne del Castillo, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

The surge in entertainment production has been fueled by New York State’s program of production credits, about $420 million annually, which can offer savings of 30 percent or more on some production costs. Productions have collectively spent more than $33 billion and filled roughly 1.8 million jobs in New York since the credit program was introduced in 2004.

More than 50 television shows have sought credits so far this year, including two that will be released on Apple’s upcoming video service, an untitled puppet show and another called “Sterling,” as well as a new crime drama on Showtime, “City on a Hill.”

“We have had an explosion,” said Hal G. Rosenbluth, the president of Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, “and that explosion was called streaming services.”

Kaufman Astoria Studios was one of the country’s first studios, opening in 1920. It later became Paramount Pictures and eventually moved to Hollywood. The studio in Queens is adding two more sound stages, for a total of 12, Mr. Rosenbluth said.

“We have a show for CBS, a show for the new Warner Bros. streaming service and a show for Apple that’s in the house now,” he said. “In the old days, it would have been ABC, NBC and CBS and maybe Fox.”

The revival of television production in New York can be traced to the mid-1980s with Bill Cosby’s decision to base the Cosby Show at Kaufman Astoria, Mr. Rosenbluth said. It spurred producers to consider New York and not just Los Angeles as places to shoot.

But business faded in the 1990s as other cities, states and countries dangled lucrative incentives to attract productions. The production credit program helped lure the industry back, said Doug Steiner, who started Steiner Studios. (Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which won an Emmy Award last year, was filmed at Steiner.)

Without the credit, he said, New York City and the state would largely be a destination for filming scenes, while the production is done elsewhere.

“These productions will go wherever it’s least expensive to produce,” Mr. Steiner said.

Cities in Canada, particularly Toronto and Vancouver, are major competitors because of generous production credits and a favorable exchange rate.

Beside the production credit, the state has helped the film industry in other ways. For its Brooklyn studio, Netflix is eligible for $4 million in tax credits under the same incentives that were offered to Amazon to build a campus in Queens. Wildflower Studios has not sought a tax credit, state officials said.

The Astoria project marks a return for Robert De Niro, who unveiled a similarly ambitious effort two decades ago when he and Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul, formed the Hollywood-based Miramax Films. In 1999, they announced a $150 million deal to turn a 15-acre site at the Brooklyn Navy Yard into a dozen television and movie sound stages.

That project, however, collapsed in spectacular fashion. Shortly after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani appeared to embrace the plan, the city abandoned it, citing legal and financial concerns. Mr. De Niro and Mr. Weinstein were stunned, saying that the mayor had agreed to their vision and that they only needed to “dot the i’s and cross the t’s.”

Another group swooped in and took over the deal, creating what became Steiner Studios.

How the new studio will compare to what the actor pursued 20 years ago has not been revealed. Mr. Gordon said it was too early to say how many sound stages would be built. But Mr. De Niro, who has his own production company, TriBeCa Productions, will certainly use the studio for his own work, Mr. Gordon said.

“That will be the preferred option,” he said, “so long as it’s not booked.”

James Barron contributed reporting.

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Western Gaze: 4 to Watch from North West Studio

The little-known story of Alberta’s Black pioneers, a darkly entertaining animation about the Hudson’s Bay Company and an interactive story shot in Cambodia are among projects currently in the works at Edmonton’s North West Studio. Here are four titles to watch for in the coming months.

Skin for Skin: Heritage Moment Goes Gothic

As the governor-in-chief of the Hudson’s Bay Company at its peak, George Simpson looms large in Canadian history, known in his own time as both “Emperor of the North” and a “bastard by birth and persuasion.” With Skin for Skin, an animated short that recently completed postproduction at the North West Studio, the Calgary-based animation team of Carol Beecher and Kevin Kurytnik, have fashioned a thrilling revisionist account of the HBC under his iron-fisted rule.

Setting their tale in 1823, a time when the HBC was processing well over half a million beaver pelts every year, Beecher and Kurytnik draw on references both literary and cinematic – from Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Stanley Kubrick – to evoke a world of brutal exploitation and unsettling beauty. Creating 3-D sculptures of the main characters and props, manipulating them within built 3-D environments, and then overlaying everything with finely wrought hand-drawn effects, they craft an epic adventure that reframes a crucial episode in Canada’s historic national project.

“We’re calling it Canadian history, gothic style,” says producer Bonnie Thompson. “Carol and Kevin have done exhaustive research and are masters of the animation arts, but they also possess a deep knowledge of film history. Look closely and you’ll find references to Buñuel, revisionist westerns, and silent movies like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The film really packs a powerful visual punch. Test screen audiences are bowled over.”

Pillars of the Calgary animation scene, where they run Fifteen Pound Pink Productions, Beecher and Kurytnik first proposed the project to the North West Studio in 2012. “They wanted to investigate Canadian history from a different perspective, to explore its darker undercurrents and subtexts,” says Thompson. “We’d been looking for a chance to collaborate and were eager to work with them.”

For an earlier sampling of the Beecher/Kurytnik artistry, check out Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning. “If you should suddenly find yourself jonesing for an animated flick that doesn’t necessarily play by the rules, Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning might just be the prescription to soothe your indie soul,” says Film Threat Magazine.

Skin for Skin is directed by Carol Beecher and Kevin Kurytnik, working closely with William Dyer and a committed team of talented animators. Produced by Bonnie Thompson and executive produced by David Christensen, Skin for Skin is due to launch at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival later this summer.

John Ware Reclaimed: Cheryl Fogo on the trail of Canada’s Black Cowboys

“Growing up in Calgary I embraced the whole Western mystique,” says writer and filmmaker Cheryl Fogo. “I lived and breathed horses, rodeo stories and the Wild Cowboy West.”

Fogo’s ancestors settled on the Canadian Prairies well over a century ago, part of a wave of African-American immigration that came north in the late 19th and early 20th century, but as a young adult she was confronted with a striking absence: her own people’s experience had been effaced in mainstream accounts of Canadian history.

“Despite more than 120 years of Black presence in Alberta, no one pictures us when terms like ‘old stock’ are thrown around,” she says. “The whole White settler Canada narrative is incomplete. So I started writing for myself and others like me — to fill the hole where our stories should have been.”

Since then she’s authored a range of work that retrieves and illuminates this history – essays and journalism, children’s novels and other fiction, as well as theatrical pieces. With John Ware Reclaimed, a documentary that starts production this summer, she continues an investigation she began with John Ware Reimagined, a play that won the 2015 Writers Guild of Alberta’s Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama

John Ware, born in the Antebellum American South, was already an accomplished cowboy when he arrived in the Canadian west in the early 1880s. “The horse is not running on the prairie which John cannot ride,” reported the MacLeod Gazette in 1885. Although a legend in his own time, his story remains unfamiliar to most Canadians, as does the bigger story of Western Canada’s Black pioneers. “In telling Ware’s story, I’m able to reclaim my own place in the Western narrative, “ says Fogo.

Working with cinematographer Douglas Munro, Fogo conducted a preliminary shoot at the former Ware homestead, which remains a working ranch to this day, and now goes into full-scale production. A July shoot will feature the African-American rodeo champion Fred Whitfield, who is bringing Ware alive in a series of impressionistic of recreations. Also participating are cultural luminaries like novelist Lawrence Hill, who was filmed doing a reading about John Ware. Margot McMaster will be editing.

John Ware Reclaimed is directed by Cheryl Fogo, whose credits include the NFB release The Journey of Lesra Martin, and is produced by Bonnie Thompson for the North West Studio. Executive producer is David Christensen.

Invisible World: Interactivity meets Roshomon

The seed was planted back in 1994 when Tyler Enfield was travelling in Cambodia, a young backpacker immersed in a carefree expatriate subculture, only vaguely aware of the civil war that had recently devastated the country. But witnessing the near drowning of a local child would change all that, throwing everything into a sudden and sharp new focus. Over twenty years later, now an established writer and photographer, Enfield evokes the event in Invisible World, a novel initiative in multi-format interactive storytelling.

In Roshomon style, the 22-minute interactive piece employs shifting screens to present three separate but intertwining versions of the same story — with the child’s mother, the backpacker and a war weary Cambodian doctor each giving a distinct narrative account of the shared traumatic event.

Invisible World was co-created by Tyler Enfield and Gaylen Scorer with NFB producer Bonnie Thompson coming onboard as a key collaborator. “There was an extra level of complexity on this production, both in terms of technology and cinematic strategy,” says Thompson. “When planning the Cambodia shoot, we had to design shots for three screens and three voices, each with its own point-of-view and back story, while maintaining a visual coherence throughout. It’s a unusual way to create and experience cinema.”

Giller Prize winning author Madeleine Thien shares a scriptwriting credit with Enfield, writing the narration for the mother and doctor, and also voicing the mother’s character. The Cambodian-born American actor Francois Chau (Lost, Criminal Minds) voices the doctor. The cast features Cambodian actors Ngem Svey Ya as the mother, Sereyvuth Kem as Dr Von, and first-time Australian actor Mark Tilley as the young backpacker.

Invisible World is available in three language versions – English, French and Khmer – and is available in several versions. Invisible World: The VR Experience, coproduced with the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab and designed for HTC Vive headset, premiered at Montreal’s Festival du nouveau Cinema in 2016 and has since been shown at South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival and Edmonton’s NorthwestFest, where programmers also hosted interactive theatrical screenings of the project. App and website incarnations, designed for desktop and tablet, are due to launch later this year.

Invisible World is produced by the NFB North West Studio (producer, Bonnie Thompson: executive producer, David Christensen). Invisible World: The VR Experience is co-produced by the CFC Media Lab (producer, Ana Serrano) and the NFB North West Studio (producer, Bonnie Thompson). Executive producers are Ana Serrano (CFC) and David Christensen (NFB).

Snow Warrior Catches Cold

You need to put at least two winters behind you before you get to claim bike courier stripes in Edmonton. So says Mariah, the wiry protagonist of Snow Warrior, as she mounts her wheels and peddles off though the predawn deep freeze to start her working day.

Currently in postproduction at the North West Studio, the short documentary pays tribute to a hardy breed that plies its trade on the streets of one of the coldest cities on earth, an outdoor workplace where winter temperatures can drop to  forty below zero.

Co-directed and written by seasoned documentarians Frederick Kroetch and Kurt Spenrath, Snow Warrior was shot by cinematographer aAron Munson, who made inventive use of lightweight digital cameras. “There was a great can-do spirit on this shoot,” says producer Bonnie Thompson. “At one point the team macgyvered a bike that could be towed behind the camera, and it’s given us fantastic footage, poetic and exciting at the same time.”

Kroetch and Spenrath position their film within a very Canadian tradition of winter-themed cinema — citing NFB films like Gilles Carle’s much-loved feature The Merry World of Leopold Z, a seminal work of early Quebec cinema that was originally commissioned as a documentary about Montreal’s snow plough operators.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/vie_heureuse_de_leopold_z/

Snow Warrior is co-directed by Frederick Kroetch and Kurt Spenrath, and is co-produced by the North West Studio (Bonnie Thompson, producer) and Edmonton’s Open Sky Pictures (Frederick Kroestch, producer). It’s due to launch in late 2017. NFB Executive Producer is David Christensen.

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