What is the biggest issue facing the animation industry right now?
The big issue is to find original and innovative projects in a world where a lot already exist. It’s important to implement audiovisual projects with multimedia and social media.
What is your company doing in response to this?
We work on a topic with 360-degree thinking – not just as a TV series but also as gaming or merchandising, such as toys, related to it.
How are you using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make animated projects?
AI isn’t very effective in storytelling. We use it for making a first draft as a starting point to avoid the blank paper, which is hard to face at the beginning. We also use it to understand what is already done to try to find new ways of storytelling. Indeed, in writing for marketing and promotion, AI is very helpful.
What does the popularity of Roblox tell us about young audiences and can online social platforms be effectively used to launch new animated IP?
We cannot swim against this but need to instead surf on it. Finding new ways to interact with online social platforms is our daily challenge.
Tell us about the project you are pitching at Cartoon Forum.
It’s a 26×13′ kids’ series about the inventor of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, when he was a kid. Together with his cousin and his brother, they need to find a way to communicate at a distance because their cousin Daisy will go back to Scotland at the end of the summer.
It is a mix of adventure and science which is coproduced by POPCult (Italy), Animalps (France) and Krutart (Czech Republic), with the support of European Creative Media. The Marconi Foundation and the municipality of Bologna are partners of the project and we have had much interest, in particular from Česká televize. Our international sales agent, Windrose, has been working with us since the beginning.
