Two years ago, Viacom’s Nickelodeon announced an annual competition as it battled a ratings drop. Rookie animators could vie for the chance to create an 11-minute cartoon. With any luck, Nickelodeon would find fresh creativity. ...
Nickelodeon’s animation development team will sit for three long days in a trade show booth at next month’s Comic-Con International and evaluate in-person proposals for shorts. Comic-Con, a convention that draws 130,000 pop culture fans, will take place on July 24-27 in San Diego.
“Performance art, costumes, story boards, video, a sketch on a napkin — we’ll look at it all,” said Russell Hicks, Nickelodeon’s president for content development and production. ...
The paper of record as it a teensy bit wrong.
Nickelodeon has been doing cartoon shorts based on cartoonists' pitches for a long time. Nick was doing them when it was in partnership with animation exec Fred Seibert the better part of a decade ago.
And Fred had been doing the "cartoon pitch" thing since his days running Hanna-Barbera in the early 1990s.
Hell. Cartoonists' ideas (Power Puff Girls, Johnn Bravo, Dexter's Lab, etc.) built Cartoon Network out of the remnants of H-B, and then CN went on to make a hit of Adventure Time, the brain child of Cartoon Network's godfather Fred Seibert and ... Nickelodeon.
So here we are, come full circle. Nick is back taking pitches from all comers. It will no doubt be an exhausting exercise, but Nick might find a few diamonds in the big pile. If so, the attempt will be worthwhile, yes?
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3 comments:
Worthwhile for Nickelodeon, but not for the creators who will lose ownership of their ideas.
If they're lucky (and have some leverage) they might get a small percentage on the back end.
But they won't get a lot.
If it turns into a series they'll do just fine. the operative word there though is "IF".
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