This year at the Banff Television Festival I had the opportunity to meet many upcoming and aspiring Canadian Television content creators. One of the themes that repeatedly came up in discussion was knowing and understanding what kinds of ideas one should invest in. It takes a lot of leg work to prepare and develop an idea into a pitch for a broadcaster, how do you know if it is a good idea?
I will share my simple secret with you.
Good ideas stay good ideas.
I wake up every morning and generally have 2 – 3 ideas of varying quality while I am in the shower. Most of my ideas (Like “Dude Patrol” an action comedy about a group of kids going to highschool on the Moon who only call each other “Dude”) starts to loose its lustre come lunch time.
It took 3 and 1/2 years to get the idea for “Side Show Christmas” from concept to the first sequences of produced animation.
It is so much work to get a show off the ground that the idea has to be good. You have to be able to live and work with the idea for a long time. At the end of the creators journey, when that story has finally been told and that idea is released into the world, the world gets to decide if it is a good idea. The better the idea the longer the life it will live in the collective conciseness.
So, if you are working to develop ideas to pitch to broadcasters, my feeling is that you have to live with it for a while and look at if from different angles and honestly decide if it really is a good idea. There really is more to it than a cool character design and title. Put it on paper and put it in a drawer and come back to it later. Does it still have value and worth? Is it still something you want to put your heart and soul into?
Not to be overly pessimistic but there is a good chance they won’t like it anyway. Maybe they already have something similar, perhaps you haven’t researched properly the kinds of ideas they are looking for. There are a multitude of reasons your idea will die on a broadcasters desk.
Prepare yourself for the good idea.
When they finally say yes makes sure that it is your best idea because the journey has only just begun.
August 7, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Interesting post, and I strongly agree with your philosophy! I’m a film student looking to get a career in animation one day.
Ideas are tricky things, the one thing I would add is that for me “the idea” isn’t always the most important part of a film/programme – in fact I think essentially if the idea is the strongest part of a film then it isn’t really a strong film.
For example, if we take a film, say “The Shawshank Redemption” (and let’s ignore that the film was an adaptation for a moment) – it isn’t a great film because of the idea. As an idea, it’s essentially “a man is wrongly convicted of a crime and struggles to survive in jail, will he keep hold of his hope that one day he can escape the confides of prison or will the harsh reality of a life behind bars get the better of him?” – but that doesn’t nearly encapsulate why it is such a great film. There is so much more to it than that – the theme of hope (a good or bad thing in prison), the relationships Andy forms with the other prisoners, the absolute madness of his final escape etc etc. I guess what I’m saying is when you form an idea you have to keep hold of why that idea came to you in the first place, what seemed so great about it, what gave you that buzz – if you can make buzz grow in to something bigger and better, rather than just remaining a novelty, then you’ve got something.
Kind of hard to describe what I mean in such a few words the whole issue is really complicated!
Anyway really enjoy your blog – keep up the good work!
August 7, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Good point, there is so much more to the overall process than the idea, but at the end of the day, the idea is the foundation that everything is built upon.
Great idea + bad execution = bad show
Bad idea + great execution = bad show
Great idea + Great Execution = Great show