The Lesson of Wolf Jenkins - Assumptions make an ASS out of U and ME

We had an interesting experience over the past month with a show that we launched on our YouTube Channel – we made an assumption about how it was being received in the US which turned out to be … well … wrong.

The show concerned is the brilliant animation Wolf Jenkins which went up on Wildseed Comedy on YouTube last month and have had some great reactions. People are really enjoying it. And so they should, it’s the dumbest thing we have made and all the better for being so.

Early on though we had a couple of really confused reactions from people in the US. Some friends who we work and share our content with and share content with said that they just didn’t get it – and we sent it one of our US Twitter followers and asked them to tell us what they thought; answer … not much!  It was always possible that this person didn’t have a sense of humour at all, but because we heard it from people elsewhere we decided to dig deeper.

32% of our YouTube subs come from the US but only 24% of views to Wolf Jenkins. I jumped straight to the conclusion that we had created something that didn’t appeal to the US sense of humour. 

There’s been a lot on social recently about the differences between the US and UK.  The hilarious list of differences posted to Facebook by a US tourist which has gone viral and a listicle posted to BuzzFeed about how the Brits have Confused The Hell Out Of Everyone on Tumblr including the always excellent ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ episode

I was guessing that the understated,  anti-hero type humour of Wolf Jenkins just wasn’t playing over there.  We decided to target all our marketing at the UK.

A couple of days later I posted a question on my personal Facebook and asked my US buddies for a read – ‘was the humour (or humor) too British and incomprehensible to a US audience?’ I asked.

NO! They said as one. The problem was they couldn’t tell what was being said. It was the accent and the delivery and sometimes the music was obscuring the dialogue.

US audiences with a sense of humour love Wolf Jenkins when they can understand it. It all comes back to quality of your sound and voice tracks. If you want to appeal to as wide as possible an audience you need to get your sound right – it’s easily as important as picture. I even wrote about it here for my blog about making micro-buster movies (see rule 7).

Don’t assume. Ask. It’s what social media is for. One of the things it’s for anyway.

And its trousers, not pants.

Catching The Next Wave

This post first appeared on mipblog

I am very interested to see where the next big wave of creative talent is going to come from. Very interested. Where is the next Charlie Parsons (creator of Club X, The Word, Survivor (and therefore all of modern reality television)) going to emerge from? Or the next wave of animation talent such as graduated from the UK’s NFTS in the 80’s like Nick Park, Alison Snowden and David Fine, Mark Baker, Tony Collingwood (who between them created or co-created Wallace & Gromit, Ricky Sprocket, Peppa Pig, The Secret Show)..

For me, today’s creative climate is starting to feel a little bit like the music scene in the early 70's – if you don’t remember it or weren’t alive then it was all ‘Yes’ and ‘Genesis’ and concept albums and epic, over-produced sound-bilge and flared trousers and stacked shoes, all of which I owned.

In 1977 I was working in a factory in Germany (another story), I went to some dive-of-a-venue to see a band called ‘The Stranglers’. A fight broke out every 10 minutes between an audience member and a band member (usually Jean-Jacques Burnel) but it was the ‘Rattus Norvegicus’ tour and it was great and it was obvious that something new and big and sensational was happening to music which would never be the same again and I want the same thing to happen in TV, like now.

As the workforce in TV decreases in size, as training budgets are cut and young people move away from watching traditional broadcast television and opt instead to consume their stories on-demand, we may be in danger of deterring new young creative talent from thinking of the television business as a career opportunity. For my generation it was impossibly glamorous, it isn’t any more.

We should expect new talent to be saying ‘no thanks’ more and more frequently to our old media overtures. They seem more likely to be giving us the finger and starting a creative revolution on digital platforms. A proper, counter-culture, rebellious, offensive and challenging creative revolution that a large part of the mainstream is going to abhor.

We all remember ‘proper’ musicians saying of the Sex Pistols ‘they can’t play, they can’t write and they sing out of tune’ and only today we were looking at the 27m YouTube views that asdfmovie has got for one of its ‘shows’ and someone (who shall remain nameless but wasn’t me) said ‘I don’t like it, they can’t animate there’s no story and ….’

Yeah, whatevs grandad.

But just as The Stranglers and even the Pistols got record deals, so we too can provide a home for the new wave of talent once they’re done with smashing the system and staking out their creative territory.

Provided we don’t just try and defend the old way of doing things and provided we can be bold and open and can embrace whatever comes out of the next big thing we can survive and prosper. We may be selling new shows shows to Netflix, Amazon and YouTube and they may not look like ‘shows’ as we currently understand the term but even anarchists ultimately need deal makers and salesmen to earn a crust.

We can still be part of the new wave, it’ll just be on slightly different creative terms.

I hope so anyway, I was listening to The Sex Pistols just the other day …

Broadcasters, please will you pay more for our shows?

This post originally appeared on mipBLOG

If there has been a worse time to be an animation producer in the UK, I would like to hear about it.

The opportunities for non-kids animation are few and far between, perhaps one series a year across all broadcasters. The kids’ animation business in the UK is taking a hammering from our increasingly well-organised, increasingly creatively confident and increasingly subsidised international competitors.

The BBC (CBBC and CBeebies) is doing a great job supporting UK animation but has its own budget issues and can’t keep our industry buoyant on its own. Cartoon Network, Disney and Nickelodeon are also doing their bit and ordering shows through their European offices, but they are increasingly buying for their global markets, cutting keen deals and exercising extensive creative control.

Ultimately, all producers need our shows and characters to work at retail, and retail is having the most torrid time of all. Pre-school, where the UK has traditionally been so strong, is now chronically over-supplied and the life-cycle of a pre-school property through TV and ancillary exploitation is getting shorter and shorter. As producers, we are all in the business of trying to create classic brands with enduring appeal, and these market conditions are making it as hard as it has ever been to achieve that.

Of course, there are still opportunities, and it is important to remember that there is always a market for projects that are really really good. No amount of subsidy, cheap labour or low cost production can substitute for a project with creative cut through, great characters and great story-telling which is perfectly tailored for its target audience.

We have a lot to learn from our new friends/competitors in the digital world where producers let their products speak for themselves – I keep coming back to Moshi Monsters, but until recently, (CEO) Michael Acton-Smith spent literally nothing on marketing. He relied exclusively on the quality of his product to spread the news about Moshi Monsters.

This means that we have to be really clever and work really hard on the development of our shows. Every now and again every producer has a ‘Eureka’ moment when they first start showing something that they have developed to potential buyers and the quality of what they have produced does all the selling work for them. Equally, every producer has experienced the jolt of panic when you realise that your pitch hasn’t landed and the more the more you gabble and gabble the further away the commission seems to be.

For all producers everywhere, not just in the UK, I am sure that working relentlessly to get our products right is the way to survive and maybe prosper in these challenging economic times. It’s expensive, risky, and requires a great deal of collaboration with your prospective buyers to shape a project into something that will work for their audience. However ironically it is in these challenging times that exciting new ideas are often born, albeit out of necessity.

So, what am I saying? I guess it’s a simple message: “Broadcasters, please will you pay more for our shows?”