Kidscreen offers a lot of opportunities to pitchers and pitchees. © Brunico Marketing Inc.

Just after the first of the year Jacqueline Caro read a story in the New York Times about DIC Entertainment’s plan to revive as an animated series Trollz, the big-haired dolls that were hugely popular in the 1960s. Caro, a yoga instructor in New York City with dreams of selling her own animated series, immediately Googled Andy Heyward, DIC’s president, and saw that he was speaking the following month at the opening session of the sixth annual Kidscreen Summit.

“Looking at the agenda I was immediately excited,” she recalls. “Here in one place, compressed in three days, were all the people I needed to speak with about selling Jeanie Yogini & the Temple of Om.

Kidscreen gave newcomer Jacqueline Caro the opportunity to pitch her animated pilot, Jeanie Yogini & the Temple of Om, to all the right people in one place. © Jacqueline Caro.

That’s the name of Caro’s cartoon series, about “a willful yet loveable eight-year-old girl who discovers a secret portal to an ancient temple, setting in motion a series of adventures as she acquires yoga powers and uses them to build inner strength for herself and her friends.” With a gulp, Caro plunked down her $1,095 for the three-day event held Feb. 16-18, 2005, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

Numerous Pitching Opportunities
The summit gave Caro numerous opportunities to pitch her show, including intimate 30-minute sessions with development execs from the likes of Cartoon Network, Discovery Kids, HBO Family, BBC Kids and ABC TV in Australia. Caro was also accepted as one of 10 people to participate in “speed pitching,” where programming execs sat at a table listening to three-minute pitches. “It was amazing to get instant feedback,” says Caro. “The reactions ranged from lukewarm to loving it.”

Foothill Entertainment’s Greg Payne (left) and Jo Kavanaugh-Payne (center) met up with Betsy McGowen, svp/gm Kids’ WB! during one of the many social functions at Kidscreen. Photo credit: Nicole Feenstra.

Caro also found an interested party during the “30 minutes with” Nancy Fowler, president of worldwide consumer products at DIC Entertainment. As part of the q&a, Caro explained the idea for Jeanie Yogini & the Temple of Om and Fowler agreed to take a copy of her proposal.

There were also opportunities for Caro to improve her pitch. In the seminar entitled, “The Art of the Pitch,” Will Brenton, chief exec of the U.K. children’s production company, Tell Tale Productions, offered practical advice, including the first rule of pitching — get to know the channel you’re pitching to by watching it. He also circulating sophisticated four-color pitch brochures on some of the shows Tell Tale has sold that look more like irregular shaped popup books than the traditional pitch “bible.”

Useful for Pitchees, As Well as Pitchers
Kidscreen proved useful to the pitchees, as well as the pitchers. “It’s a great way to spread the word about who we are and what we’re looking for,” says Dea Connick Perez, vp of programming at Discovery Kids, who handed out a fact sheet to the 30 or so people who attended each of her two “30-minutes with” sessions.

At most of the 30-minute sessions, the speaker spent the first half explaining their channel and describing the kinds of shows it was looking for before opening it up to questions. HBO Family vp Dolores Morris joked that HBO stood for honest, brainy, outrageous. “We’re looking for shows you wouldn’t see anywhere else,” said Morris.