Brown Blog Films

I’m back from the Cartoon Forum  in Norway which was an exceptionally eventful week.

Celebrating 20 years, the Cartoon Forum is the key event of any animation producer’s calendar. In this time, it has financed over 300 television series worth over 1.5 Billion Euro. Over 70 producers pitch projects to an audience of broadcasters, investors and co-producers and it a great networking opportunity for producers of children’s programmes. I was travelling with director Nicky Phelan and Kathleen O’Rourke who is the creator and performer of Granny O’Grimm and we were there to pitch Granny to them.

At the end of the first day’s pitching, there was a boat trip to visit the spectacular Norwegian fjiords.

I had never been to Norway before and I was really looking forward to seeing them. But to see them first hand was truly an experience that I couldn’t capture on camera. Despite the overcast sky and the occasional rain shower, it was a really great trip.

Cathal, Griff Griffith & Gerard O'Rourke

Kathleen O'Rourke & Nicky Phelan

The Granny O’Grimm presentation was a huge success. We had 240 people in attendance while we made our pitch. 10 minutes into the presentation, Granny barged in from behind, berating us for sending her to the wrong room. She then turned her ‘bitterness and resentment’ onto the audience who were only a bunch of ‘bohemiems’ with not a ‘decent pair of trousers between them’.

At one point I almost felt sorry for the person whose mobile phone rang during the presentation as granny focused a moment’s rage upon them.

Our allotted 40 minute slot was up very quickly where I was almost mobbed with a sea of business cards from interested broadcasters and investors. Over the weekend, we had so much traffic to grannyogrimm.com that the website crashed and Granny almost doubled the number of friends on Facebook. It’s safe to say that our pitch was a success and was picked up by all the trades as being the most popular presentation of the forum, Kidscreen claimed that the presentation will “go down as the best pitch ever at the Cartoon Forum”.

The next day, the Cartoon Tributes awards ceremony was held and prizes were given to Broadcaster of the Year, Distributor of the Year and Producer of the Year. To our absolute delight, Brown Bag Films won the prestigious ‘Producer of the Year’.

This was a huge honour for the company and to be recognised by our peers for such an award is something that we will always be proud of. Norway is very expensive and definitely a country where you would need a small mortgage just to get a hangover. It still didn’t deter us as we celebrated our award until the early hours.

The next Cartoon Forum is in Hungary and hopefully by then, we will be in full production with Granny O’Grimm.