A creator recently said to me, “You know, it’s easy to come up with a good idea.  Making it happen is the hard part.” In fact, I think both are hard!  But my area of expertise has been the later –making it happen. In this blog, I will talk about projects I am actively pitching and about my experiences taking them across the globe to find financing and get them produced.  Names may be changed to protect the innocent!

It is hard to end Kidscreen this year without reflecting on the extremely competitive state of the international broadcast market. I took a casual poll amongst my producing friends in France, UK, and Canada to see if their territory was as challenging to secure a broadcaster as it is the US.  The bad news is that in each country it seems like producers are having a harder and harder time getting slots. With fewer and fewer programming slots available in these key co-production territories and the amount of producers vying for these slots, it is no wonder that the stakes are high.  At Kidscreen this year, attendees did their best to maximize this precious opportunity.

Keynote speaker, author and journalist Steven Berlin Johnson (Everything Good is Bad for You, Where Good Ideas Come From) spoke about the Natural History of Innovation— where good ideas come from. Johnson’s theory is that big ideas take a long time to develop and are usually built on top of ideas from a number of different sources. Innovation comes from mixing these ideas.

Day 2 of Kidscreen and the Delegates Lounge, restaurants and bars at the hotel were a buzz with people talking about creative ideas and how to turn them into the next big hit, and, perhaps most importantly, how to finance them!

It’s was officially day one of the Kidscreen Summit 2011 in NYC and the conference was in full swing. Producers and broadcasters from all around the globe are here in record attendance with unconfirmed reports of over 1600 people registered -- probably a couple hundred more not!  The Delegates Lounge, where many of the meetings take place, was packed full and buzzing around, leaving all of us veterans reminiscing about the old days when conference took place in LA and only about 100 people total attended. The energy is positive and people are upbeat and lots of business seems to be getting done.  Kidscreen has morphed from a chilled out meet and greet, development, co-production, “take a step back and have a bird’s eye-view of the business” to a mini MIPCOM market.