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Distributed Production House Methodology and 'telling it right'
Just before i flew out of dubai, the team at work landed on a very exciting collaboration with atomfilms.com to co-produce and animate an internet series. The series would deal with the midlife crisis of an all american extreme sports hero who for the first time in his daredevil career had started getting cold feet and shivering knees before any stunt. The series of episodes would be a humorous take on the life of the character, his friends, his predicament and dillemma of living upto the expectations of his fans.
My first read at the script made me wonder if this was going to be yet another Johnny Bravo and i realized eventually that it would have to be quite a significant effort to bring it anywhere close to a production of that quality ( not aesthetically ). Why?
Well...... considering that the series was being produced for an extrovert american audience in one of the most introvert and conservative part of the world... i was sure that the project had a few interesting hurdles in store for us.
A brief example of how conservative the United Arab Emirates is, exhibits well from the fact that www.atomfilms.com is amongst the forbidden sites to which access have been blocked to internet users in the emirates (for fear that a few productions on the site may have content that would be considered offensive to islam or the culture of the region)
So the questions i ask myself again and again is -
-Sitting in such a dissimilar part of the world, how was it that we were supposed to understand the 'true californian lifestyle' of our protagonist?
-In the world of animation where everything exists because the production intends it to, how do we know or how do we feel the vibe of what needs to be put in to this production ?
-Would 'we' the producers and animators who are visually illiterate to creative vandalism, surf culture, skateboarders, extreme sports, the slang and lingo of the streets be able to portray the same to the literate masses of the USA and most importantly ' the world ' ?
- Arent we at the risk of passing on a very misleading message to the future audience of what extreme sports in the USA is all about ?
Ofcourse, our assurance lies in the fact that the series is being co produced and we would receive our share of valuable information from our partners i.e atomfilms and our reliance on the information from internet and films should not be undermined either.
The predicament that arises from that however is the genuiness of all our information sources and in the broader sense the fact that 'all the information we require, comes to us filtered and biased.
The only reason that the productions of this sort gets outsourced to countries abroad is to make it feasible ....but does the monetary cost effectiveness come at the cost of possibly misleading an audience?
The bigger picture really is... how do we go about enhancing simmilar creative collaborations around the world and yet be able to 'tell it right'
Final Fantasy has had issues initially with the fact that it was being made for an asian audience - says muqeem....
what made them change ? it was being made in hawaii for an asian audience ..
jungle book made for an international audience but was the true essence of india understood and depicted aptly ?
road to eldorado - character has a brooklyn accent but she is mayan ??
result of globalization ? or just plain misinterpretiaion ??
are we looking at an americanized version of stories of the world ?? is that fair ? even if its made for an american audience ???? arent they also telling an hawaian
more research on that from my end to figure out where and how that goes....
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