Animation and wanderings of director / producer Tim Tyler

The Side Show Christmas Logo

This is the proposed logo and title treatment for “The Side Show Christmas”.

Bella - Flyball Champ Silver

Bella got this stylin’ hairdo for the KAOS flyball Tournament in Regina.

I am always in the process of development and producing numerous ideas, all of which are in different states of existence, anywhere from idle entertaiment while sitting on the toilette or walking the dog, to full blown fully, financed productions.

The first time I pitched to Canadian Children’s Broadcasters was at the Banff Television Festival in 2001. I was able to get a meeting with TELETOON, and I pitched a show I was working on called “The Legends Of Wesakechak”. No Luck.

The second time I pitched was also at the Banff Television Festival in 2002. I pitched “Legends of Wesakechak” again as well as a series called “Althea”, and another series called “Mrs. Periwinkles Fun Files”. No dice. They were all gunned down and I personally got quite beat up by the experience. There was one broadcaster in particular who just about made me cry. I have come to the belief that “You know it is a good market when you can leave and not feel like you just got stood up at the High School Dance!!!!”

Since then I pitched numerous other shows before I got my first development deal with TELETOON.

Each one of those projects is a dead baby that is littering the floor of my imagination.

My personal feeling is that broadcasters want to see you stick it out in the industry for quite a while before they will even consider giving you a deal. Even if you had the goodest idea on earth there is a good chance it will tank if it is your first experience with a broadcaster who has never heard of you before. Television is expensive to make and time consuming. I honestly get the feeling that a lot of broadcasters want to get to know you before they will spend any money or time working with you on an idea.

Consequentially, It is important that as a creator of Television you have the ability to walk away from an idea and move on to something new, no matter how much you love it.

Every failed pitch provides another layer of compost for your imagination.

You must take that experience of pitching and use it as an opportunity to develop market intelligence so that you are better able to understand what they are looking for in an idea so that 6 months or 1 year later when you pitch the same broadcaster a new concept, they can see that not only have you developed professionally, you can create good ideas, AND most importantly, you can listen and respond to what they need from an idea to work for their network. I am not saying that you will succeed with that pitch either, but what you will have done is to start building a key relationship with both the network and broadcaster.

So, when you are holding on to that baby and every conceivable broadcaster has said no (except that one eccentric foreign broadcaster who does not have any development money for Canadians, and unfortunately can not trigger anything within the Canadian system, but loves it), there comes a time when you have to decide put it away in the closet and move on to the next pitch.

At the BBQ wrap up to the 2002 Banff Television Festival, I was feeling kind of dejected, and had the opportunity to speak with Chris Bartleman of Studio B, whom I had to pitched earlier that day.

His advise was to just keep pitching.

He was right.

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.