Case study – Blue Rocket Productions

[http://www.blue-rocket.com.au]

Tell us about Blue Rocket.

Blue Rocket is a digital media studio based in Hobart, Tasmania. We produce cartoons, mainly for kids, and our activities are spread across TV, broadband and mobile.

The Australian market is tiny in comparison to the global market. Does this mean that going off-shore is necessary?

The Australian market is very small and isolated. I think this is reflected in the way Australians view the market. Some creatives living in Sydney think Sydney is some sort of integral hub around which the rest of the world hovers in breathless anticipation. Creatives living elsewhere in Australia have fallen for this and think they’ve cracked the big time if they get recognition from the ones in Sydney. The fact is, the entire Australian market is only the size of one city in Europe or Asia or Latin America. We are therefore forced to play in the international arena if we want to have any chance of getting a return on investment.

Is it just for audience or for money, or are the two the same?

I think it’s both but I would suggest that if the motivation is money you will fail. The audience is street wise and will see through your evil plan, so being motivated by the desire to provide compelling content will probably cut it better.

Can you do it yourself or do you need partners?

I think you need the right partners. No single partner will really help you across all platforms so it probably needs to be a mix. Also, when you partner with an organisation it’s usually for a very long period of time so you need to be pretty sure that it’s someone you can get along with and really trust.

We’re looking at ‘digital’ – both mobile and online. Do you have any pointers for writers who are seeking a global audience?

This is a very challenging arena. The boundaries between online and mobile are becoming increasingly blurred and the environment is changing rapidly. Because interactivity is about allowing the audience to make its own story decisions, it is futile to attempt to impose a completely linear narrative model. I think writing for interactive is about generally guiding an audience in direction and giving them lots of freedom to make their own choices. For many participants the journey is more important than the outcome.

There is a great story around how Bang the Cat couldn’t get traction in traditional media until it was a success in new media. Can you retell the story here briefly?

Well, I wanted to make an interstitial TV show that cost almost nothing to produce so I came up with Bang the Cat. It was simple really. In each episode a cat just sort of explodes. We produced some episodes and I took them off to international markets, optimistically expecting sales. Everyone who saw it fell about laughing and told me to keep taking the tablets. But we didn’t make any sales until we started to get some serious traction in the mobile space. From there we got TV licences and now [http://www.bangthecat.com/] gets some reasonable traffic.

What advice would you give to people planning on looking for offshore opportunities?

If you’re planning to look for opportunities offshore, I think the UK is the best place to start. The market has a similar sensibility to here but they are much more advanced and are a significantly larger market. If you can get traction in the UK it will be easier to grow into other territories from there.

 
 

---