Audio of Interview with Jonathan M. Shiff

can you tell us a bit about your background?
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 * Producer of children and tween TV drama series
 * Graduated from Monash university as a lawyer and worked as a lawyer for a few years
 * Worked as an advisor for a soap opera called Carson’s Law, and made a deal that he would work as their legal advisor if they trained him to be a producer
 * Left in the mid 80’s to start his own company
 * Fell into children’s television because he had a daughter and couldn’t find any videos that were decent for her to watch
 * So he shot a wildlife series as a pilot, which was quite successful – it was based on close up photography, integrated with an animated map called ‘search for the worlds most secret animals’ and the map traced the outline of the country. Eventually shot in six countries around the world with over one thousand animals
 * This formed the basis for the sort of production approach he took later with drama – extremely ambitious, high production values, an innovative way of storytelling
 * Followed up by “Kelly” a series about a police dog, and then later by Ocean Girl taking them into American television and onto the global stage

What sort of things do you have to consider about the audience?
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 * A children’s audience is not any different from any other audience except they are probably a lot more critical
 * The standard of children’s television is a lot higher than the bar set for prime time drama
 * Children’s television is 100 times more demanding
 * Children are a much tougher audience, a lot less forgiving, you can’t mess them around

So they’ve got high expectations?
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 * They’ve got high expectations in terms of the production values
 * They’ve got expectations in terms of storytelling
 * Whether its children’s television in the present media delivery format, or on the net, or on mobile phones, or hologramatic experiential television, its all about good storytelling
 * They don’t differentiate between the Harry potter movie and what they watch on television even though the budget differ

Have delivery expectations changed?
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 * The business that we’re in we’re still about broadcasting in the traditional format but more and more productions are being VOD-ed for streaming on the net in a lot of countries
 * In America and England you can look up Nickelodeon and watch the episode you missed
 * We are delivering still on tape format, and soon that will become a digital delivery, its just that the vehicle for viewing the program is changing from the traditional television screen
 * More freedom and flexibility with reaching the audience
 * The manner of our delivery is changing in a very exciting way but I think its wrong to run around say we need to reinvent the narrative structure

Do you think these exiting new delivery systems is threatening to the quality of children’s television programs?
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 * No, they run on two very separate tracks
 * The challenge that faces a lot of the world’s broadcasters at the moment is that they’ve got all these innovative new delivery media and they don’t have a lot of innovative media
 * There is a lot of innovation in the way we tell stories but there is not a lot of innovation in the content
 * Content and technology are two separate tram lines

"Bus Life"
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 * We recently won a silver medal in New York for Wicked Science – Wicked Science was filmed by 120 people there are 2 series for over 20 million dollars, it’s in 40 or 50 countries worldwide, it’s a very successful series, it won an AFI award hear in Australia – it was beaten in the New York festivals by a series shot on handi-cam by six kids on a London bus, who rented the bus and drove round and round a suburb, called “Bus Life” for the Disney Channel in England
 * That was more innovative, they only had six crew they didn’t have like 12 hair and makeup and 18 grips, but it was really interesting and innovative and won the gold medal for the best in the world
 * That just shows you that innovative content is not technology or cost driven, it’s ideas driven

You were talking about how you’re program has been globally successful … how do you think it achieved this?
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 * Sometimes by going toward the middle ground you can be more commercially successful … and it’s the same in any sort of cinema craft skills, there are films that are considered to be masterpieces but are not commercially mainstream
 * We do a traditional formula … a lot are aspirational stories for young girls, empowering stories, fantasy plays a large part, or the collision between the real world and the fantasy – H2O is about teenage girls who happen to be mermaids with superpowers, the elephant princess is a princess who discovers her magical superpowers but resists the call to remain being a normal girl because she’s afraid to enter the other world … So it’s the same thematic at play here, its commercially in one channel I could probably come up with something wild and crazier but restrict the audience
 * We’re in a very expensive media, as in the budgets are higher, and so you have to sell it in a lot of places to get your money back
 * If I did something really funky and innovative, I’d love to do that, but I probably wouldn’t justify doing it for ten million dollars because I may not make the money back, it may only sell in Australia, but it might be fabulous but its market would just be Australia.

Do you think that multimedia platforms are important for a global audience?
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 * Increasingly they are
 * The challenge is to try and think of something organic and that is organically going to work on those platforms. Not just invent something novelty-wise that looks cool on those platforms but has very little power of storytelling
 * I think a lot of people are doing a lot of groovy things on multimedia platforms but they’re boring and they don’t have the power of character or narrative or story that we specialise in
 * The challenge for us is to take what we do and now expand it into those platforms … and we are moving more and more in that direction
 * One of the projects we have in development is dinosaur diaries, its about kids who are stuck three million years ago in Australia on a dig site excursion and they can’t get back so they’re now lost with dinosaurs … and one of the things that comes with that is a diary that sits on a separate track to the 24 minutes of drama and its used to enhance the experience for the audience by taking you behind the scenes or taking you into the world of individual characters - in other words, a mini production within the production that’s only designed to be used by kids on the web during the week while they’re waiting for next Sunday nights episode of the dinosaur diaries
 * So more and more, we’re facing the challenge of how do we do it organically. At the moment, I have to say that not a lot of content exists, a lot of it is simply promotional web driven and quite pedestrian and is really more about downloads and photos, and you know, it’s publicity

Do you think that that kind of extra content is relevant to today’s kids?
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 * Yes, I think that without it the audience is starting to drift
 * The trick is, how do you do it so that it’s not just magazine publicity. How do you do it so that you’re actually stretching and expanding the adventure and the participation of the central narrative

Do you think that through the content – characters and storylines – you have been able to address a more technologically aware audience?
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 * No I’m not happy … I’m constantly brainstorming and trying to think of ways to improve what we’re doing because I feel that we’re out of the step technologically, I feel that we’re loosing audience off television to the net. I feel that the challenges as producers, as creators of content is to try to get out there and recapture that audience. I’m very concerned about all that, I don’t think I’ve broken that code but it provides a constant challenge .. and that’s only occurred in the last two or three years, where the audience is drifting from television – the bus has kind of left you in the dust and you have to run and catch up to the bus and run ahead of it a bit

Do you have any ideas for how to do this?
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 * Dinosaur diaries is one where I think that from go we’ll be scripting the diary as much as we’ll be scripting the narrative drama of each individual episode

So they have to be made alongside one another
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 * It has to be organically part of the original concept … I mean people sit down and go ‘what makes a successful film?’ and if people knew what makes a successful film we’d all be rich … they don’t.
 * But I can tell you now that a lot of the children’s audience globally wherever there’s the net is drifting away from traditional television, and certainly our audience is not longer driven by schedules.
 * People work their television on demand … in a heartbeat there’ll be no such thing as scheduling. Its on demand content, if people want to watch the Jonathan show, they’ll dial it up … and where they watch it will become more and more their choice

Will there be any extra cost on your part?
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 * That’s a tricky one, I hadn’t thought about that, it’s pretty expensive what we do now so it may even be a good thing … for example every time I move its effectively an oil tanker having 120 people – its not so easy to move, the kids on the London bus deserve the gold medal
 * Sometimes its not a matter of cost, sometimes it’s a lot cheaper to go with the innovation

in a nutshell ...
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 * In a nutshell basically technology and content are two separate tracks
 * Innovative delivery is a big challenge for everybody, but at the end of the day there is no point putting rubbish on, only good stories will work … whether they’re on your watch for five minutes, or like maybe our kids, kids, they’re going to go into their bedroom, go into a hologram and swim with ocean girl, you know, inside the story
 * The technology debate needs to be run on one level but the content debate is a separate one.