CANNES – Two industry trends that have dominated Canadian TV in recent years — the need for foreign co-production partners and the digital revolution — came together at MIP Jr. last weekend in Cannes.
The two-day tyke TV bazaar preceding the MIPCOM market saw Canadian indie producers unveil a slew of new shows accompanied by digital extensions that are aimed at the world market.
Bell Media's Cirque du Soleil Media and U.S. partner Saban Brands announced plans to co-produce Luna Petunia, a preschool series from showrunner Bradley Zweig and inspired by the Quebec-based circus troupe – and Shaftesbury began shopping the upcoming CBC preschool series The Moblees, an interactive musical adventure show inspired by a live family show that has toured around the world, to international buyers.
Also on the Croisette, Michael Souther, an executive producer at Toronto indie Amaze Film +Television, attended MIP Jr. to snag bigger audiences abroad for the upcoming YTV hybrid live action-animated comedy The Stanley Dynamic. The lure is a multi-cam family comedy, instead of a teen show, that aims to bring parents and kids together for co-viewing.
"It's a challenge to be able to bring kids in with parents to watch TV shows," Souther told Cartt.ca about the family show like most others on Canadian TV, except for a twist: one of a set of twins in the live action series is a two-dimensional animated cartoon character.
Amaze is working with Relish Interactive and YTV on a digital extension for The Stanley Dynamic.
That's typical of other Canadian kids TV content being shopped in Cannes this week, according to Valerie Creighton, president and CEO of the Canada Media Fund, who gave a presentation Saturday to MIP Jr. delegates. "Now it's the way the world is going," Creighton said of Canadian TV producers now being specialists in cross-platform content after four years ago being first compelled to create digital extensions of TV projects.
"They are watching TV with their devices in their hands, they want to look at interactive everything and to interact in every which way with the programming.” – Russell Hicks, Nickelodeon
She added TV project financing is getting harder to find everywhere, "and we're no exception to that," prompting the need by Canadian producers to target an international and increasingly cross-platform TV market.
The message at MIP Jr. was young video viewers, being digital natives, may well see their tablet as a first screen and their TV sets as a second or even third screen as kids multi-task. "They are watching TV with their devices in their hands, they want to look at interactive everything and to interact in every which way with the programming," Nickelodeon’s president of content development and production Russell Hicks told MIP Jr. during his own keynote address.
Kids hopping about while viewing video content is no news to indie producer Doug Cuthand of Blue Hill Productions. He brought his APTN sci-fi series Guardians Evolution (pictured above), with an accompanying video game, to MIPCOM to find foreign co-production partners for a third season.
The stop-motion animated series Guardians Evolution is set in 2078 where a group of teens take on evil to save a post-apocalyptic Earth beset by deforestation, oil dependency and rampant pollution. "All our characters are aboriginal from around the world. It's a mixed bag and they are brown-skinned," Cuthand explained.
"So we can do this in other languages and send the series around the world," he added.
The MIPCOM market continues through October 17.
