Kel's MIPCOM Photos #1

From a different camera...

Yep, Ann watching HP5 on the plane for the nth time.
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Obviously before the 26 hours of flying.
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Ann handwriting her travel blog on the night train to Cannes.
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A festoon of funghi at the Cannes markets
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Seafood on the beachfront.
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The oldest restaurant in Cannes.
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The seafood platter at Aston & Brun
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One of the stands at MIPCOM. It's hard to see in the photo, but on the left it says "The Wonderful World Of Dic" which I found terribly amusing.
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At dinner with some of the people we met whilst we were there. To Ann's left is Cate McQuillen from mememe Productions. On Ann's right is our market mentor, Jenny Lalor, from Burberry.
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This was at the infamous near all-night bender we went on at the Carlton Hotel. Cate and Jenny again.
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Sally Browning from Film Finance Corporation, displaying tattoo, and Ann.
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From left rear, clockwise: Andy Wilson from Zoot, Ann, Jim Shomos from Let's Talk, Sally, Kelly and the omnipresent glass of rosé.
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Kel and Andy
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Aubs Tredget from Té Papa Films, and Ann.
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Ann and Kel and that damned rosé again!
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Ann, Jenny and Kel.
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Ann has no recollection of what she was talking to Aubs about, but it looks like she's about to punch him in the guts!
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A blurry Brian Rosen (head of FFC) and Sally.
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Kel and her tipsy admirer, known only as Guy (pronounced ghee!)

Rat Queen - Finished

Ready for the FC website:

MIPCOM Photos #1

It begins.

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The Disney pavilion. They got so large that MIPCOM put them on the beachfront.

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Kel at the AFC stand.

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The red carpet is everywhere outside!

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Some stands display their show merchandise.

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Inside the Participant's Lounge, where table space is at a premium and the sound of laptop keys clicking and mobile phones ringing fills the air.

Kel wades through her junk e-mails.
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Handy!

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MIPCOM Madness Day #4

Thursday 11^th 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.

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.

MIPCOM Day 2

Another busy day ahead of us.
Yesterday went quite well. Everyone was very nice, very encouraging, and no-one seemed to hate us! They all said how much they liked the design of our projects, and a couple of people had even taken the time to go to our website and look at the Frankenchicken pilot, so thanks to JC for making sure the site was up and running! One of the people we saw was from the CBBC who was really lovely and offered some great advice and feedback on the projects, ending up being interested in the projects we thought wouldn’t have suited CBBC’s demographic, so I guess you never know what people might be looking for. Almost all the people we saw asked if we had local broadcasters attached to the projects, which we don’t. We didn’t get around to seeing anyone from the major Aus networks before we left for France, so that’ll be something that we’ll do on our return. Everyone loved the badges: MIPbling!
The Participant’s Lounge has free wi-fi and a decent connection rate, and free coffee and soft drinks, which is good cos I’m pretty shattered this morning from a bit too much grog and five hours sleep.
There was a huge party being held by the Indian delegation at the Majestic Barriére hotel along La Croisette. It was packed! We got given scarves on the way in. There were four long tables with Indian food, plus an open bar until 10pm. I had another shit G&T, and have decided that I shouldn’t have another until I’m out of France! We got talking to a lady from China after a security guard stopped me from going into the (unmarked) sponsor’s lounge. She was hilarious: “They are rude. Don’t you think they are rude? We don’t need the rudeness. We need harmony. They give us scarf when we come in to represent the harmony. I am a reporter. I will write what I think about this. We don’t need to be pushed.” She was smiling when she said it so it was a little bemusing but also funny.
We’d been invited to Cake Entertainment’s after dinner drinks in the old part of town as well which ended up being great fun. We met up with some people, had a number of drinks, then went on to the Grand Hotel for another drink. On the way, I saw a gold sequinned pillow lying on the ground that I gave to Jenny Lalor cos she kept saying that she really needed to sit down. Then after a champagne (no tonic left for a G&T at the bar… wtf?), we got back to the apartment at 2am.
Fortunately, Le Pink and the Zanzibar were relatively quiet, although it sounded like the garbage men were playing bin-hockey this morning.

MIPCOM Virgins

Yes, that's Kelly and I. We're in our first day at the market, and things are going quite well so far. Everyone's been very complimentary about our four projects (Frankenchicken, Daz Danger, Big Red Hat and Hello Yello), so that's something of a confidence boost. One of the awkward things to say to people is "No, we haven't approached local broadcasters to gauge interest". This seems to be a very important element to have, and it's something we're going to go full guns on when we return to Australia. One of the hardest things is to find the right person to talk to. The major netowrks are here at the market, but they don't have a booth, so they're most likely riving about looking for already-produced content. We'll approach the ABC who have a booth, and if we can't get a meeting while we're here, we can at least find out the right person to contact when we get back home.
Two more meetings, then two drinks parties to go to before the end of the day!