Thursday 11th October
Our first meeting yesterday was with a couple of guys from House Of Cool (www.houseofcoolstudios.com). They have a lovely website and some fantastic work. It’s so nice to see people who do such crafted art and animation. Karina Stanford-Smith from Parthenon Kids was great to talk to. They’re distribution company is keen on staying reasonably small and invested in the projects they do take on, rather than amassing a huge catalogue of content. She liked all our ideas and told us what stage we’d need to get to with them before Parthenon could come on board. I think she wants to see some scripts for Big Red Hat (I honestly can’t remember! Kel wrote it all down!). Then we saw Jilliane Reinseth from Studio B. They have a nice slate of in-house programs, so we also hit them up for the potential of outsourcing work to us. It was interesting to hear that Studio B had been a service provider for 16 years before they started to develop and produce their own content. I’d started to get a little disheartened in meeting companies who were the same age or younger than BigKidz that seem to be so far ahead of us in terms of production and distribution. However, the people who start these companies have often come from positions within other companies where they’ve made lost of industry connections and perhaps even have experience in acquisitions, sales and distribution, which we don’t have. We’re just humble animators! Well, maybe not humble haha! Damien Tromel from TV-Loonland was the only person who said that he didn’t see why kids wouldn’t like Frankenchicken and didn’t know why I was pitching it for an older demographic. I’m not sure that he understood what was meant when I said that I’d been told by others that it’s too dark for a younger demographic. “The pilot’s set at night, so of course it’s dark!” I was thinking, yeah mate, but I’m talking about the subject matter, not the lighting! It’s very clear to me that finding an audience for any of our projects is not the issue; it’s convincing the broadcasters. It seems that very few are willing to take any risks or chances on something untried or non-formulaic, yet they keep looking for that next big hit, like a new Spongebob or Simpsons, totally forgetting that when those properties came out, they were different and a risk.
Christin Simms from Breakthrough was great fun. It was her fist time at the market, although not Breakthrough’s. They seem keen on looking at all demographics, as well as the possibility of co-productions. Canada and Australia have co-production agreements, so that always helps it look more attractive if there are tax breaks in there somewhere. It was interesting to hear how one of their projects, Jimmy Two Shoes, had started out about a goody-two shoes in hell. After development it turned into a kid’s program about a boy who has fun in the worst place imaginable, so although it sounds like there wasn’t a huge change, considering it went from being an adult show to a show for 8-12 year olds, that’s quite a big shift. I think that Breakthrough are a company that put any projects they create or pick up into development for some time in order to mould it to something that they feel they networks will look at. They handle pre- and post-production, usually outsourcing the production work to other studios, so again this is an opportunity perhaps to get some work. Christin is from a writing background, and she told us that should they take on one of our projects, they‘d get Canadian writers involved which wouldn’t bother me. I don’t care as long as they can write well for animation! We got along with Christin well – it’d be great to work with Breakthrough.
A guy that we’d met during the first timer’s tour who is here to promote his website where artists can post their work and producers give feedback on, Graham, found out today that his website collapsed, just after he’d done a bunch of publicity for it. I felt so bad for him because there’s nothing that he can do except hope that his colleagues back in London can fix it quickly. As it was, the website had only gone online about a day before the market, so he was already under stress. He told us “I don’t know why I’m smiling, cos I’m so angry about it!”
There were drinks at the AFC stand where we caught up with Joel, and the boys from Monkey Stack, Justin and Troy. We also met Lisa Hague from Halo Pictures in Sydney who we’d worked for on a project just recently for Poison Control in the US. It’s bizarre to think that we have to go to France to meet people in Australia! The batteries on Kel’s camera were flat too, so no photos! Hoping that Justin and Joel will send us copies of the photos they took. Then we went on to Café Roma for dinner. I had a great fish soup and struggled through a seafood pasta because my gut was expanding like a balloon and it was so hideously painful that I had to say “Sorry guys, I’m in intense physical agony here so I have to go back to the apartment!” I don’t think anyone was in for a huge night, except Joel probably. Jenny Lalor had told us that if she heard that we went home before 2am, she was going to kill us. So keep it under your hats.
I slept the sleep of the catatonic last night. I could’ve slept another couple of hours easily.
Just two meetings today, then freedom! My batteries are charged, so I will take some photos of the market today, although I suspect the crowds will be less today as many people had their last day on Wednesday.
Later
Just finished our last meeting, so now we’re free agents, as it were. We might consider looking about at some of the other exhibitors because you never know: they might be able to see us. At least we can get some contact information for the right people, which I started to do a bit of yesterday. Most people seem to be winding down now. Perhaps that’ll make them more chatty, although they’re probably sick to the back teeth of people firing their spiel at them! We’ll take it easy for the rest of the day, though.
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