Annecy recap days 3-5

June 17th, 2010 festivals, markets, seminar notes

I’ve been home for a few days now, so time is long overdue for the second part of my festival report. The MIFA market was interesting as every year, and I had time to take in roughly one screening per day for the whole festival. My favourites were ‘Barnacle Lou’ & ‘Yes Virginia’ in the screening TV3 and almost all films in CMHC1. Also the ‘making of’ talk & world premiere of Pixar’s ‘Day and Night’ was an interesting (and packed) event.

Thursday’s highlight was, of course, a MIFA institution: The Finnanimation picnic. We had lots of friends, old and new come to our event. The greatest thing though was that a lot of them also showed up for the sauna later in the evening. Here’s a small taste of how great if was:

On Wednesday I attended the round table discussion on the topic ‘Does licesing drive programming’ and on Friday I checked the cross-media pitches in the Creative Focus. The discussion was interesting and you can find my notes on it below. The pitches were a mixed bunch, just as last year. It seems the French come there to show their projects and talk about them and the few non-French projects come with a real agenda like finding co-producers or broadcasters. The problem for them is that no-one knows who’s going to attend so it can be a big waste of time.

Anyhow, the festival was again a great place to meet the small family that is the European animation scene and I’m sure I’ll be there next year as well. Until then, au revoir!

Notes on the round table discussion ‘Does licensing drive programming’

Here are some rough notes I took during the round table. If you have any questions just post them in the comments!

Media consultant Johanna Karsenty from Médiamétrie-Eurodata TV Worlwide, France talked a bit about different trends in adapted programming. Her presentation included these figures:

In 2009 the top 20 of youth programming was based on the following original materials:
Comics 21%
Manga adaptations 7% (particularly strong in Italy)
Games 4%
Live action films 4%

That leaves 64% of the top 20 that were original formats, which according to Karsenty means there’s still room for creativity and licensing can’t be said to hold the reins over programming.

Philippe Alessandri, president of Tele Image Kids, talked about the different viewpoints that producers and broadcasters have on licensing.

- With the fragmented audiences nowadays pre-financing is difficutl for producers
- Launching new IP’s is risky and difficult for broadcasters, they prefer IP’s that have a track record

1. Licensing contributes to the success of a programme

Kids are conservative viewers, they like what they know
Kids who like the licensed toys are more likely to watch the show
Tele Image makes sure all their projects have all fringe features in place before launching a property

Broadcasters benefit from the buzz created by the licensing strategy
Licensing generates more ad spent for the broadcaster as licensees run ads during the show

2. But viewers cannot be seen only as consumers

IP’s that do well in licensing don’t always translate well to tv-shows
Toy driven shows mean narrow audiences because you can usually only target boys or girls
Genre neutral shows have less licensing potential, but can attract larger audiences
Broadcasters’ priority should remain to look after the editorial policy and programming consostency
Broadcasters also have to follow regulations and be sure they don’t get mixed up  in licensing that conflicts laws etc
Programming strategy should take licensing into account but not let it be the main guideline

-> In his view licensing does drive programming, as the market is tough and financing shows isn’t easy.

Tom van Waveren, creative director of Cake Entertainment UK:

When Cake look at a new project they first want to see if it makes them sit up and smile, if they are touched. Whether the IP is previously well known is only secondary.

TV is sill the strongest launch platform for something new. Still there’s new competition for the prime media position all the time. We need to be smart to get our audiences to attache to our stories. Licensing is only one tool in this. As producer or broadcaster you need to reach audiences through many different ways.

Sylvia Schmoeller, Super RTL Germany

Licensing is important for pre-school IP’s. There’s a misconception with some producers that even if you have strong licensing etc lined up a show would be better off, but if you don’t deliver on the ratings it will still be pulled off the air. Sure licensing helps but entertaining the audience is key. Schmoeller understands that produrers need that 2nd leg of cash flow to make money. But just banking on the licensing succes doesn’t guarantee a good show.

Moderator’s question: What’s the biggest difficulties with adapting existing properties?

Tom: You want to analyse what people conect with in the IP. Is it the tone or the characters, the setting or what?
If the original works as a book but not as a script you need to tweak and play around with it. You need to take risks and sometimes you miss. Can you communicate the core idea? You have to communicate it to all the licensing players, the game designers, directors, comic book artists etc everyone who works on different parts of license.

Annecy – short recap on days 1 & 2

June 9th, 2010 festivals, financing, licensing, markets, seminar notes

Annecy has been great already, and it’s only two days into the festival. The German party on Tuesday was especially nice, with lots of familiar faces and many new acquaintances.

I’ve seen one screening per day so far: The TV competition #4 on monday suffered from eardrum piercing volume levels and a projectionist who didn’t care if the aspect ratio was cutting out heads or subtitles… Metropia on Tuesday was a big dissappointment. I wanted to like the film, but with such a clichéed script that wasn’t even well dramatised (think Avatar – thanks to Andy Blazdell for the comparison) it just didn’t work. The storyline had glitches and I didn’t even care what happened to the main character during the final chase…

I also went to check the conference on “European studios’ competitiveness”, of which I saw 4/5 speakers. The most interesting to me were Bruno Gaumétou of Neomis animation and Petter Lindblad of Copenhagen Bombay. Below is a short extract of the notes I took from their presentations. If you have any questions just post them in the comments.

Now it’s off to see TV competition #3 at Decavision and then off to the Mifa market, see you around!

Notes on conference: European studio’s competitiveness

Bruno Gaumétou (Neomis animation):
Who are the competitors? 5000 animation studios world wide…2754 in Europe, that’s a lot!

When Neomis was founded it was on the 14yrs of experience working for Disney.

Their goal was to be the go-to guys for high quality projects. They would provide connections, know-how, ideas and expertise.

Their ’survival kit’ for the global industry (with pifalls) is:
- varied range of services (but rooted on the core business)
- technical diversity (but limited to solid internal expertise)
- a large pool of artists (but talent is rare)
- the production process (but it has to be constantly updated)
- a stable core team (but how to secure a stable work load?)
- a wide industry network (but building trust takes time)

Says it is important for EUR studios to work as a network. That is the only way to compete, keep talent and deliver projects on time!

Says for studios to survive they have to be a service company AND a production company.

Petter Lindblad from Copenhagen Bombay
‘Low budget’ animation and crossmedia

Being competitive in EUR means doing projects that can be financed in EUR, completed in reasonable time and use EUR talent.

Shrinking your budgets is a way to stay competitive. Financing is faster and less complicated. There’s fewer equity partners. And the producers investment results in a higher ownership share. Low budgets enable you to keep the project in-house. The team is close together and teams are smaller.

How they do it:
Mandatory thorough development so you know the budget will hold. Accurate animatics reduce redundant animation. Keeping the production informed and the director close to the team helps catching issues early. Optimizing the project from start to end e.g. not animating feet in 3D when they’re not in the frame. Being flexible with teams e.g. shuffling people from layout to animation or vice versa on demand.

Copehagen Bombay only do original projects to keep the IP inhouse

Drawbacks with low bud projects:
No time and money to correct mistakes – scenes might have to be cut out altogether
You need to be 100% sure if the films intentions beforehand

Annecy 2009 – what a fest!

June 15th, 2009 festivals, markets

Just returned from Annecy on saturday, where I had a real blast! For the first time I arrived already monday at noon, instead of my usual tuesday evening, so I had the time to watch more films than usual. And boy, there were some good ones! Among my favourites were Brendan and the Secret of Kells (I’d describe it as Spirited Away with a celtic feel) and the Log Jam series, both of which happened to win prizes as well.

The business side was good as well, there was a lot of action at the MIFA animation market despite of all recession talk in the months before. I had some great meetings and many projects took bigger or smaller steps. One of the highlights of every MIFA is the Finnish Picnic organised by our Finnanimation initiative. Here’s some shots from the action:

(Photo of me & finnish liquorice vodka by Claire Tenant)

All in all it was a great trip, business wise as well as fun. See you in France next year!