David Winning 

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TRIBUNE SIGNS WINNING TO A "HAT TRICK"
 
Director David Winning has signed on to direct three more episodes of Gene Roddenberry's ANDROMEDA for season five.  The series veteran will have now helmed an even ten episodes of the Kevin Sorbo series since it's launch; and his work has won Eight awards for directing including Five Golds in Houston and Chicago. Principal photography was completed yesterday in Vancouver on the first of the three entitled "ATTEMPTING SCREED".  He also recently completed an episode of Stargate: Atlantis for MGM that will air August 13. Winning is repped by Lee Dinstman at APA in Los Angeles.
 
THE BACKLOT    Wednesday, August 11, 2004      C4

Winning’s Atlantis will premiere on Movie Central


Episode was filmed almost entirely on location in a lovely piece of forest near Langley

LYNNE McNAMARA VANCOUVER SUN


    I met veteran Vancouver film and TV director David Winning back in 1996 on the Southlands set of his locally shot picture, Exception to the Rule (starring Sean Young and then-relatively unknown actors Kim Cattrall and Eric McCormack).
    We met again in Burnaby a couple of years later on his TV movie, Don’t Look Behind You, with Pam Dawber and Patrick Duffy.
    Now Winning has nine feature films to his credit, as well as four seasons of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda and multiple episodes of its sister series Earth: Final Conflict.
    Winning, the 2002 recipient of the Director’s Guild of Canada’s National Award for Excellence in Television Drama, also spent four months in Hungary shooting the ABC family series Dinotopia (now on DVD).
    Counting a recently filmed episode of the brand new MGM /Sci Fi Channel series, Stargate Atlantis, he’s directed episodes for 17 TV series, including Street Justice, Neon Rider, Dead Man’s Gun, Breaker High, Call of the Wild and Twice in a Lifetime.
    The Atlantis episode, Childhood’s End (a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel) will premiere Friday night in the US on Sci Fi Channel and Monday night on Movie Central in Canada.
    The series stars Joe Flanigan as Maj. John Sheppard, Torri Higginson as Dr. Elizabeth Weir, David Hewlett as Dr. Rodney McKay, Rachel Luttrell as Teyla Emmagan and Rainbow Sun Francks as Lt. Aiden Ford.
    Guest stars on the episode are Courtenay J. Stevens, Dominic Zamprogna, Shane Meier, Julie Patzwald, Jessica Amlee, Sam Charles, Alana Husband and Calum Worthy.
The storyline has Sheppard, McKay, Ford and Teyla crash-landing their “puddle jumper” ship in an alien world with a strong electromagnetic field. There they meet Keras, who, at the age of 24, is the eldest of the indigenous population.
The team soon learns why there are no older folks around.
“I think it will remind fans strongly of Lord of The Flies and even a bit of Logan’s Run,” says Winning.
After years of trying unsuccessfully to work on Stargate SG-1, Winning was thrilled to be asked to handle the Atlantis episode.
    “Stargate was the one series I couldn’t crack in Canada — I never got a shot to direct any of them in seven seasons,” he observes. The gig required him to immerse himself in an SG-1 crash course.
    The Atlantis episode was almost entirely filmed on location in a lovely piece of forest near Langley, where the art department created an amazing forest village. Working with Zamprogna, who plays Aries, the antagonist in the story, was déjà vu for Winning.
    “I hadn’t seen him since 1993 in Montreal when he was a child actor on an alternating episode of Nickleodeon’s Are You Afraid of The Dark?
    He was powerful then and he was very powerful as the force to be reckoned with on Atlantis.” (We remember him in Vancouver as one of the ensemble cast of the teen soap, Edgemont.)
    Though he loves it, Winning says directing episodic television is like working in a vacuum.
    “No one ever contacts you to say, ‘Hey, we really liked the way you directed that episode.’ The only way you ever know is if they call you back.
    “You have to push forward in this career and give producers the best episode you’re capable of directing — given all the compromises and restrictions imposed. It’s never an easy balancing act. I can’t afford to wait for reactions, I push forward to new and different projects. Working for others over these decades has certainly been lucrative and educational, but it’s not where my heart lies.”
    And, to that end, he’s starting to make movies again.
    As we speak, he’s prepping his next episode of Andromeda— he’s directing three for this fifth and final season.
    He’s also up for two low-budget feature films for USA Network and the Sci Fi Channel to be shot later this year: one a true crime bank robbery story, the other the legend of Bigfoot.
    “Maybe we can put them together and have a Bigfoot Bankrobber,” he jokes.
 
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BORN: MAY 8, 1961  CALGARY, CANADA  

In the fall of 1977, 16-year-old David Winning wrote and directed a short Super 8-millimeter drama inspired by the lead character "Babe" in John Schlesinger's "MARATHON MAN (1976)".  Winning began making films in 1971 with a Kodak camera his father had given him on his tenth birthday. "GAME OVER" was a science-fiction story of the last survivor of germ warfare and was shot on weekends in October and November 1977 on campus at the University of Calgary.  Starring school friends Paul Brown and Scott Harley, the film became a "special drama" project and awarded the director five school credits toward successful graduation at the end of the school year.  Loaded with Kubrick tributes -- full of many empty hallway shots and layered with music from the Alan Parsons Project, Tangerine Dream and Manfred Mann; the film proved to be a labour of love with a complicated (for the time) optical sequence at the film's conclusion - constructed pain-stakingly by hand - and taking nearly four months to complete.

His first effort in 16 millimeter with an actual crew was the short drama "SEQUENCE (1980)" shot near Cochrane, Alberta in the summer of 1979 and funded in part by a Canada Council Explorations Grant.  The film starred long-time friend and collaborator Stan Edmonds as the fateful hero Rick in a "DELIVERANCE (1972)" inspired story of peril in the wilderness.  Allen Desnoyers provided what the local paper called "a spare and haunting" piano score, no doubt as a tribute to John Carpenter's stylized soundtrack from "HALLOWEEN (1978)"  The film was later blown up to 35mm and Cannon International released it as a pre-feature short in the United Kingdom.

Based on the success of "SEQUENCE", Winning, now 22, began work in 1983 on his first feature effort; a similar although expanded version of the earlier short film.  This time, again with the theme of peril in the woods, "STORM" began shooting in the forests near Bragg Creek, Alberta in August 1983.  With a cast of five, headed by David Palffy and Stan Kane - and a crew of only four; including DP Tim Hollings, soundman Per Asplund, assistant director Michael Kevis, and makeup artist Stan Edmonds - the group filmed the drama over four weeks and then retired to re-group and raise more money.  The film was eventually completed over the next three years, with a total budget of $72,000 (CDN) -- and inspired attention and some rave reviews at festivals in 1986.  The Cannon Group screened the film in Milan, Italy and agreed to distribute it once more footage had been produced to add to the film's length; at the time it was only 79 minutes long.  In January 1987, 23 additional minutes were written and shot; produced under the production title "STORM-AID". The now 102 minute debut feature was released by Cannon International in April 1988 and by Warner Home Video in 1989; selling over 20,000 cassettes. 

Winning now turned his efforts to a second feature.  The project "KILLER IMAGE" began to take shape in 1986 as a writing project between Winning and Stan Edmonds.  The group realized the next step in feature production was going to have to involve some star power.  Michael Ironside and veteran character actor M. Emmet Walsh were signed to star as brothers in the mystery-suspense tale about a photographers murder - and what acts had been captured by the lens in his final moments.

The story was filmed in the STORM forest and in locations around Calgary, Alberta in October 1990.  John Pyper-Ferguson and Krista Errickson, co-starred.  Malofilm, a distributor from Montreal, and Pierre David, in Los Angeles, were partially funding the project and this time the budget was considerably higher.  The film was eventually released on Paramount Home Video and received it's US premiere as a finalist at the 1992 Houston Film Festival.

Winning has gone on to a successful career as a feature film and television director; with currently eight features to his credit and over sixty episodes of television -- including work on fourteen different series. His first two independent features led to an award-winning stint as guest Director for Paramount Pictures Television, Cannell Films, Nickelodeon, Disney and the FOX NETWORK. His episodic work has garnered international awards including First Place Golds at the 1994 and 1995 Houston Film Festival, the 1995 Gold Hugo and Two Silver Hugo's from the Chicago International Film Festival, and four national GEMINI nominations for Best Director/Dramatic Series. In 1996, his third feature, the Lance Henriksen thriller "PROFILE FOR MURDER" premiered on HBO. Also on HBO, the release of the new Sean Young/William Devane thriller "EXCEPTION TO THE RULE" for SABAN and LION'S GATE FILMS which won First Place Gold at the 1997 Houston Film Festival. The film is currently available on videocassette from Artisan.

He began directing network television at the age of twenty-seven for Paramount's "FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES". Following this with a two-season tour on Cannell's police series "STREET JUSTICE"; making a mark in the industry in Vancouver. From there he moved onto children's television; with four seasons on Nickelodeon's hit series "ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK?" and a simultaneous four seasons with Fox's "SWEET VALLEY HIGH" in Los Angeles. Ten years of episodic production has led to more recently wrapping work on the Showtime/Disney western anthology "DEAD MAN'S GUN", three second-season episodes of the comic book action series "NIGHTMAN" for Tribune, and the pilot and first six episodes of the UPN/FOX series "BREAKER HIGH".

In the summer of 1996 he re-teamed with Michael Ironside and Frederic Forrest for the Showcase/Odeon military thriller "ONE OF OUR OWN". Directing his first studio feature next, "TURBO: A POWER RANGERS MOVIE" for 20th Century Fox, was the Number 4 top-selling Video in August 1997 (BILLBOARD). Winning spent the fall of 1997 shooting in Scotland with Jason Connery on the "MERLIN" project. Most recently he directed the Patrick Duffy/Pam Dawber thriller "DON'T LOOK BEHIND YOU" which premiered to nearly 2 Million viewers on the Fox Family Channel. Currently dividing time between episodic work on Pax's Angel series "TWICE IN A LIFETIME", Jack London's "CALL OF THE WILD", "EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT" and starting in the 2000/2001 season, Gene Roddenberry's "ANDROMEDA" starring Kevin Sorbo. Since premiering in the fall of 2000, the newest sci-fi series has been Number 1 in Syndication. This April he won three awards at the 34th Houston Film Festival; including GOLD for directing Andromeda.

David Winning lives in Los Angeles.