MIPCOM Day 3

Wednesday 10th October

OK, recap of yesterday. Like I’d said, it was a busy day with us seeing 8 people. Once again everyone was very nice. The lady from DECODE was a bit flat, but it’s possible she’d been up late the night before! I don’t mean that to sound nasty! Perhaps she’s just really laid-back! Joan Lofts from Contender (Peppa Pig) gave us some great advice. She was definitely the most fun, and she had small streaks of extremely bright colour through her hair, so she fits right in at an animation studio. I was very interested to hear her say that the company management is her and one other person, so not all companies have an endless list of admin and management! Now I don’t feel inadequate for not having a CEO, COO and VP! Chantal Ling from Amberwood was lovely, and seemed very interested in all our projects, even asking if we do service providing. Amberwood hooks a lot of people up for co-production and international agreements, and Chantal’s familiar with working with Australian companies, which is always a boon. We saw Anne-Marie Gaskin from Daro. I had met her before many years ago when I used to work for Animation Works as her twin sister, Liz, was Office Manager. Also saw a guy called Patrice who, if memory serves, is the nephew of the guy who owns Daro and he worked in-house at AW for a short time. Now when I think of it, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see either of them there. During a break, we passed the Sesame Workshop stand and thought “Hey, why don’t we find out if they’re interested in sourcing some content from us?” so we grabbed a business card from the kind lady at the front and will approach them after we get back to Australia. There are a few other people or companies that we need to do that with; we were wither unable to get a meeting with them whilst here, or it was a case of it didn’t occur to us or we’d not heard of them. For instance, after a lot of our meetings, people had said “Oh you should approach Teletoon as they have something called Detour which is interested in acquiring material for an older demographic.” Problem is, Teletoon are here but don’t seem to have a stand, so we may have to hunt about for them at a bulk stand (where companies book time at booths) or contact them when we get back to Aus. We sat outside for our meeting with Dan Reeves from Corus Entertainment, getting our retinas seared by the sun! It was unbelievably bright. Corus is a great company to be familiar with since they have a production house and distribution wing (Nelvana), and seem to have some kind of ownership connection to Teletoon and YTV which are toon channels in Canada. We hit him up for outsourcing possibilities as well and he gave us the name of the guy we should approach for that. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We saw two people from Jetix at the Majestic Barriére, Catherine Wai and Jeremy Briscombe. They were, possibly, the most opaque of the people we’ve seen thus far, not rude or anything; that was just the feeling I got. Jetix is a huge company with a majority of it owned by Disney. Once again, the project we thought we should pitch to them was the one Catherine was least interested in. However, she was drawn to Hello Yello, despite the violence in the story concept, which is good cos HY is a really short format with 1 minute episodes so that would be a great starting project for us as a studio – not so much financial risk in comparison to our longer format projects. It’s also a show that can be used as mobile phone content or viral animation.
We saw our crazy Chinese lady again! Her company has a stand at the Palais du Festivals and she was in the main entrance area when she spotted us. She got her boss (at least I think it was her boss) to take a photo of us all, then got another associate to do it again because apparently her boss “always makes me look awful in photo!”
I was so knackered by the time we got back to the apartment. Thankfully Kel took care of dinner, cos I would’ve burnt it and not noticed! We were both short of sleep from the night before, and Kel had only had 5 hours sleep the night before that! When we’d first arrived, we’d found some DVDs, one of which was the My Little Pony Movie that Kel put on to have a look at after dinner. It had Danny De Vito doing a voice in it! I have no idea how they secured him. Perhaps he had a financial interest in it. His wife, Rhea Perlman, was also in it. Wow, it was awful!
Meeting another 8 people today.