About
Interested in getting your foot in the filmmaking door? Want to hear about exciting local film opportunities? Looking to make meaningful connections will industry professionals?
Come out to our roundtable event on Wednesday, April 5th at 6PM in the East Common Room!
Panelists
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Brian D. Verhoog
Brian D. Verhoog is an award-nominated Designer and member of the Directors Guild of Canada. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, he immigrated to Toronto, Canada as a child and eventually studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.
He started as a production assistant in the film and television industry and graduated as an assistant director. While on set, he observed the roles of the art department and how they played in the productions and he could apply his OCADU skills to that department.
Collaborating with Directors, DOPs, Writers and Producers, Brian helps develop the project's unique visual style from concept to final execution.
His work was essential in designing numerous film and television projects that have become successful in North American and International markets. Some popular series include The Hardy Boys (Hulu), Blood and Water (Omni TV), The Good Witch Series 6 & 7 (Hallmark), Anne of Green Gables (PBS Movies), Soul Food (Showtime) and Art Direction on Titans (Warner Bros), and American Gods (HBO). He recently completed season three of the Hardy Boys and Peter Tolan's FX Pilot ''Belated'' starring Kal Penn.
Brian is nominated for a 2023 CSA Award (Academy of Canadian Film & Television) for Production Design for his work on Hardy Boys Season Two.
He is starting a new CBC project, a comedy series for the coming year.
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Gregory Bennett
Gregory Bennett, Associate CSC Member, is a Toronto, Canada based cinematographer whose credits include legendary Canadian director Don Shebib's feature 'NIGHTALK', which premiered at TIFF 2022, Peter Hitchcock's feature 'A SONG FOR US', about the 1960's Yorkville folk scene and CSC-nominated horror film 'IT'S ME, BILLY'. Gregory recently shot director David Fernandes' horror series 'CREEPY BITS' which has been picked up for Season 2 and indie short 'LUNACHICKS' directed by Jess Joy, winner of many awards in festivals worldwide.
A keen observer of light and mood, Gregory has lensed numerous shorts, commercials and music videos and is comfortable in a wide range of styles and genres. His work has been nominated three times for CSC (Canadian Society of Cinematographers) awards and he won the best cinematography award for the feature 'THE BAD MOTHER' at the Hamilton Film Festival.
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Chelsea Attong
Chelsea Attong is a production designer, art director, and installation artist. In 2016, she placed first at the Sleepenvie Art Installation Competition against four experienced artists and won the TD Mosaic Art Battle in 2017. She showcased her interactive art installation “Embrace” to 4000 guests who attended the annual four-day exhibition, Come Up to My Room 2018 at the renowned Gladstone Hotel. At the end of 2018, Chelsea discovered her interest in production-design, and eagerly delved into the film and television industry. Within one year, she was hired on twenty-two projects in the art department.
She has production designed notable projects from the Juno’s, Nike, Luna Li, the Legacy Awards, B.E.T., Appleton and Sean Brown, The Raptors, and recently had work published in Complex Canada with photographer Oshane Howard. This past year, she production-designed work for The Bay x Raptors campaign that took over Union Station, and also designed the recent UGG X Fred VanVleet rollout that was featured at Yonge and Dundas.
Her work is purposeful, provocative, and unregrettably raw. She leaves sentimental impressions that guide viewers to open up and get in touch with the most vulnerable parts of themselves; all while striking them visually.
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Claire Ross Dunn
Claire works as a writer, story editor and producer. She has written several movies for TV, including Love at Look Lodge (Hallmark), Cupids on Beacon Street (City TV) and the story for Ice Wine Christmas (Lifetime). Claire was Executive Producer and a writer for the comedy ZARQA on CBC Gem, and Supervising Producer for Nickelodeon/YTV’s Make It Pop. Claire’s other TV writing credits include Little Mosque on the Prairie, Degrassi: The Next Generation for which Claire earned The Alliance for Children and Television Award for Excellence, The Smart Woman Survival Guide for W/Cosmo TV, and Wingin’ It, earning Claire a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Writing in a Children’s/Youth Program.
Along with her husband Kirk Dunn, Claire co-wrote the play, The Knitting Pilgrim, which Kirk continues to tour both nationally and internationally.
Claire’s first novel, At Last Count, released by Invisible Publishing in 2022, was on the Globe and Mail 100: Best Books of 2022 list, was a summer reads pick by the Toronto Star, a CanLit book club pick by Zoomer magazine, and an Editors’ Pick by 49th Shelf. She recently received Canada Media Fund funding to develop At Last Count into a TV series.
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Rodrigo Barriuso
Rodrigo Barriuso is a Cuban-Canadian filmmaker based in Toronto. His short film, For Dorian (12), screened at festivals worldwide, receiving awards at Inside Out, Mix Copenhagen and the Torino LGBT Film Festival. His debut feature film, Un Traductor (18), premiered at Sundance Film Festival as part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition and won the award for Best Director at the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival and the 17th Pune International Film Festival, among other accolades. Un Traductor was Cuba’s official entry to the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020. Barriuso is an alumnus of different talent development programs including TIFF Filmmaker Lab, Berlinale Talents and the Sundance Institute's Feature Film Program Labs. He was selected to participate in the 40th session of Cinéfondation's Résidence du Festival de Cannes in the spring and summer of 2020, as well as in the Nipkow Programm Fellowship in the autumn of 2021, where he began developing his second feature film, Neverman. Barriuso holds a BFA in Cinema Studies and a MA in Contemporary Art History from Toronto Metropolitan University and OCAD University respectively.
