OIAF day 1:

Everyone still seems to be arriving and getting their bearings, and there's not as much slated in todays series of panels. the first batch of people I managed to run into were people I keep running into! Namely Rob Anderson (Freelance game developer) And Gene Fowler (Loogaroo) making their rounds. Also I met a former colleague of mine I'd not seen in almost 7 years. Paton Francis. when we last crossed paths, we were new graduates of our program. Now, he's an animation director at the National film board of Canada, and has a film being screened in tonights first showing!

the morning session went over a bit of marketing and co-production, and how it works between countries, in this case, Canada and Europe. Leading the panel was Jan Bonath, a german director for a series called Dragon, which is a stop motion animation series sold and viewed in over 70 countries.

Many things I'd never even knew about before about overseas outsourcing came up, such as co-production treaties! Before a peice of work can be outsourced, its destination must be eligible and signed into the animation co-production treaty, and that's before even any paperwork or contracts for the series are signed! Then we went on to shares between the studioes, what kinds of margins are distributed financially and in terms of sheer workload, and how/what gets outsourced, in this case between Canada, Germany, and Korea.

In the afternoon, there was another panel of co-production between companies and the difficulties that sometimes come up. Afterwards, I was able to talk to some of the panelists! Namely Xiao Tzu, president of Delphi Films, Caterina Vacci; producer of Atlantica Films in Italy, and Oliver Dumont, president of eOne Family programming and merchandising, and learned even more about how different processes need to be when co-producing from the ground up for multiple countries, which works much differently than just buying network rights, and dubbing a series, as I thought it was. For instance, just time format. they explained, using Dragon as an example, when it airs in North america, it's 12 minute episodes, 26 episodes a season, broken into 4 chapters. Now when producing the same story with the same narrative in Germany for instance, it needs to be reformatted to 7 minute episodes, 26 episodes a season, with 2 chapters. This was but one of the MANY examples of co production difficulties companies and studios face when launching their product in international territories. (more on that when I return) And here I was thinking it was so much simpler. According to them, it's not!

Later on, I also met and talked shop with Keith Savage, owner of Savage Films in Ottawa, something a bit more local! He specializes in storyboarding Live action sequences, so he gets a lot of calls from local businesses and advertisers shooting commercials to help them out. He was just as perplexed as I was about the international reformatting, so I didn't feel so bad struggling to come to grips with it. The more you know, I guess!

And now, I must be off to the first Animation short competition. More updates as the adventure continues!