I’m happy to report that I’m feeling much better this week though I confess I still haven’t had time to pet a dog or eat a dumpling.  You see we recently started production on 26 episodes of our newest short-form series, “Small Potatoes,” a show about four adorable singing potatoes.  I have to tell you that I have never loved a project as much as I love “Small Potatoes.”  Someone asked me recently, “Why potatoes?”  I have absolutely no idea.  I just feel these characters.  They are pure.  They have soul.  I love them.

 

I spent this weekend in Brooklyn at the BAMkids Film Festival where the Small Potatoes’ first short film, “Imagination (Give It A Try),” made its world premiere.

It was a wonderful and very well run festival filled with odd and interesting films from all over the world.  What struck me most was how true each film appeared to be to its creator.  There was no sign of a big toy company or a broadcaster influencing the content of these shorts.  They were closer to art than commerce.  They were personal.  And I have to say, to a TV guy like me, that was refreshing. 

But what I liked most about the festival was getting to watch the kids watch the films.  That was a real treat for me and such a healthy reminder of just who our audience is.  It’s sometimes easy to forget about the kids when you spend your days stitching together co-production deals and haggling over lines in a budget that is already too lean.  But, as cliché as it sounds, I really do make my shows for the kids.  So it was great to spend a weekend seeing them smiling and laughing along with the Small Potatoes.

Another one of the highlights for me was having my mother attend the screening in Brooklyn.  Though she doesn’t live very far away, it is rare that she gets to see anything that I make in front of a live audience.  Here she is with me and Jeffrey Lesser, our amazing Little Airplane Music Director.  When I introduced the two of them, I said, “Mom, this is Jeffrey.  He takes care of me when you’re not around.”  Which he does.  And for which I am very grateful.

I was asked to do a short Q & A after each of the screenings.  Two of the kids who did our voices on “Small Potatoes” attended the festival and I invited them to join me up on stage.  Hearing what this audience wanted to know about the films was just amazing.  One little boy who appeared to be about three years old asked, “How did you get the kids into the potatoes?”  I thought that was great.

Another kid in the audience asked one of our child actors, “How did you get to be a potato?”  The actor said, “Well, I was on my couch one day and the phone rang and my mom said, ‘It’s Little Airplane.  You’re a potato.’  That was it.”

The KidScreen Summit was exhausting.  Being an indie is exhausting.  And being a boss is exhausting.  So, my friends, my foes and my froes, it should come as no surprise to you that your faithful blogger is exhausted. 

I am exhausted from arguing about budgets on conference calls.  I am exhausted from explaining why music for a preschooler must be as good as music for adults.  I am exhausted by an industry that pretends to value children but really just values selling to children.  I am exhausted from eating soup every day for lunch.  I am exhausted from making change upon change to character designs that were perfect two months ago.  I am exhausted from waiting for replies to e-mails that date back to MIP Jr.  I’m exhausted by the fact that all of our awards and all our high ratings don’t protect us from misguided notes.  I’m exhausted from smiling during meetings when all I want to do is scream.  I’m exhausted by my yearlong course in how to get a show off the ground in Canada.  I’m exhausted from not having the time to go on my runs by the Hudson.  I’m exhausted from carrying my brown canvas bag full of show bibles around the world like a preschool TV Willy Loman.  I’m exhausted from the 200 e-mails a day that I swat gently back across the planet like badminton birdies.  I’m exhausted from the blood, sweat and tears that we put into every script, every composition and every frame of animation.  I’m exhausted by what the dwindling license fees have done to my beloved preschool TV industry.  I’m exhausted by spending more time discussing the toy aisles than the stories.  I am exhausted by not having time to read a book.  I am exhausted by the fact that people still lie.  I’m exhausted from all the weekends I’ve given up to our Little Airplane Academy, to writing our pilots and, of course, to writing this blog every week, snow or shine.

So what do I do about this?  Clearly, I need a rest.  I need to replenish.  So I’ll take a day or two off with Mary and walk in the woods and drink wine.  I’ll pet a dog.  I’ll eat a dumpling.  And then I’ll get back to work.  And I promise this is the last time I will ever complain.

Because no one ever said that having an entire business built around making preschool television shows would be easy.  And although I’m exhausted, I am still here.  And I’m still excited about every new project we have going on at Little Airplane.  And, just like an athlete or a new mom, I am determined to survive this fatigue.  Because running this little company is my Olympics.  And these preschool shows I make are my babies.  And they need me.

 So what’s exhausting you?

 Josh

There was a moment at Little Airplane’s KidScreen party last Tuesday when something quite extraordinary happened.  Bobby McFerrin and his son Taylor had just finished their set and Bobby invited Dan Zanes to come up on stage with his guitar.  The two musicians had met only a few hours beforehand during the sound check.  “What do you want to play?” asked Dan.  “Anything,” said Bobby.  And Dan began to play.  And Bobby began to sing.  And the energy between these musicians began to flow.  And the song they “wrote” together, entirely improvised, was absolutely amazing.

This image of Bobby and Dan stayed with me throughout the busy KidScreen Summit and became a symbol of the conference itself.  As I walked through the crowded delegates lounge each day, I saw duet after duet being played at each table and on each white couch.  And it occurred to me that this is what I love most about the KidScreen Summit:  the sometimes intentional and sometimes spontaneous pairing of different people and different companies from all over the world.

It happens in the hallways, in the balconies, passing on the escalator, down in the bar, in the meeting rooms, at the buffet, in the lobby and while waiting for a cab.  The duets are about characters, treaties, trends, IP, service work, iPhone apps, books, toys, co-production deals and anything else that might be considered an instrument of our kids’ entertainment business.  And it wasn’t only duets.  There were trios, quartets and even a rock band or two.  In short, the delegates came.  They saw.  They jammed.

I had a great time at the Summit.  The energy was upbeat.  There was laughter and hugs and talk about who would get which new job.  I read once that if you drop a big beautiful shell into a terrarium full of hermit crabs, the alpha hermit crab will crawl out of his own shell and move into the big beautiful shell.  Then, a moment later, all of the other hermit crabs will quickly rush about changing their shells, upgrading whenever possible.  At this KidScreen Summit you could almost hear the happy sound of people scrambling out of their old shells and looking for the next, new exciting shell they hoped to move into.

I had meetings in and around the Hilton with new and old friends from every corner of the globe.  Production companies, broadcasters, distributors, animation studios, film companies and show creators.  And, of course, there were the wonderful Brazilians, who carry their warmth, creativity and generosity of spirit to each and every conference they attend.  And they seem to attend them all.

But my best meeting of the week was not a meeting at all.  It was dinner on Friday night with my dear friend Jocelyn Christie, the publisher of KidScreen Magazine.  I swept Joce away from the Hilton in a black car after our last KidScreen meetings and I took her to Amanda’s, a quiet restaurant in Hoboken away from the delegates, the speakers and her amazing staff.  We toasted what we both agreed was the smoothest and most successful KidScreen Summit ever and talked the night away over red wine and molten chocolate cake.  Congratulations, Joce.  Your Summit was a symphony.

What were some of your favorite moments from KidScreen?

This morning I woke up and everything was okay.  Nothing was behind schedule or over-budget.  Nobody on my staff was mad at me for anything.  There was work and the prospect of work.  And I was excited about all my friends from all over the world who are getting ready to come to New York for KidScreen.  I woke up and I felt–what’s that word?–happy.

I felt good about this industry I have chosen.  I felt good about the fact that my creative conversations still far outnumber my business conversations.  I felt good that I get to spend most of my days writing songs about Potatoes or looking at designs for characters named “Fuzz” or hanging artwork by my staff on the walls of our red brick studio.  Don’t get me wrong, I have as much stress and grief as anybody who runs an indie, but somehow not today.

Today I just feel grateful.  I feel grateful for the number of people who have taken a chance on me and my team.  I feel grateful for the fact that the creative spring that I draw from (that we all draw from!) has not yet run dry.

I feel grateful for the Brazilians, the British, the Australians, the Poles, the South Africans, the Canadians, the Uruguayans, the Germans, the French, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Slovenians, the Mexicans, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Finns, the Egyptians, the Qataris and everyone else who has welcomed myself and my staff into their countries and into their homes since I began my career twenty years ago.  Our industry is far more international, far more culturally intertwined than any industry I know of.  I’m grateful that when I look through my inbox the e-mails come from all over the world and they’re all about one thing:  Making great preschool TV.

I feel grateful for the spirit of collaboration that still exists between competitors in our business.  If you haven’t seen this yet, just stop by The Grand at midnight or Prix Jeunesse or Cartoon Forum or any one of Adina’s dinners.  You will feel such a common bond between companies, such camaraderie, that any type of Stalinist corporate position will seem isolating, unnecessary and a little ridiculous.

I feel grateful for the patience that my staff has shown me over these past ten years as I learned how to morph from a shy writer who slept until noon into a businessperson who owns cuff links and gets on planes and tries to read deals.

I feel grateful for the currents of emotion that sweep through me whenever I make something new:  The fear that it will suck, the tenacity to finish it anyway, the relief when it’s done, the anticipation when I’m about to share it with someone and the pure joy I feel when a kid or an adult laughs at one of my jokes or sings one of my songs.

I feel grateful to my senior staff, Jennifer Oxley, Tom Brown, Tone Thyne and Jeffrey Lesser, for sharing Little Airplane’s journey from year to year and from show to show.  Each day we make something new together and each day it feels like the very best thing we have ever made.

And I feel grateful to Dr. Laura G. Brown, our Director of Research, who has informed every show we have ever made with her profound understanding of young children and how they learn, how they feel and what they most enjoy.  Laura has been my secret weapon for almost ten years now and she makes sure that our shows are not just lovely and funny but that they have something in them that’s really good for the kids.  You may think I’m the one who decided “The Wonder Pets!” should teach teamwork but actually that was Laura.

And finally, I’m grateful to you, my readers, my community.  I’m a very quiet person by nature.  I don’t like to be around a lot of people.  Like many writers, I think I feel connected to the world mostly through my work.  So I’m grateful to all of you for being at the other end of that connection.  I’m grateful that you listen to me.

And now I guess I’m wondering what you’re grateful for?

Josh

The older I get, the less I care about bigness and the more I care about quality.  Do I want a large studio or a great studio?  Do I want 500 friends on Facebook or five friends who will love me no matter what?  Do I want to make 104 episodes that are hard to sit through or 26 episodes that will be remembered and beloved for years?  The answer is obvious but it’s taken me awhile to actually get here.

Like most people in TV, I used to get seduced by the prospect of power or size or money.  But it’s become clear to me just how unhealthy these things are.  No matter how you dress them up–as good business, as profit, as growth–underlying it all is an insatiable need for more.  More money, higher ratings, more plastic toys on shelves.

But it is just this need for more that I believe is the Achilles heel of our species.  It’s why we exhaust our resources.  It’s why there is such disparity between the world’s rich and poor.  It’s why we tend to eat so much.

But the space that most of us carry around inside us cannot be filled by money or ratings or food.  We all know this deep down but still we claw our way toward the next thing.  Even the thrill of winning some award only lasts until the morning and then the hunger sets in for the next victory.  But the solution is not to try to win another award.

For me, the only solution is in the making of the work itself.  It’s getting a small taste of something true in the creative process.  It’s the joy of creating something.  That’s where I try to find my happiness.  All the rest of this business is, for me, simply a means towards that end.

I have a writer friend named Adam Beck who lives now in Hiroshima, Japan, with his family.  When we were in college Adam wrote and directed a one act play called, “John Wayne’s Foot” about two friends who fight over a lucky rabbit’s foot that was once presumably owned by John Wayne.

One of Adam’s two actors dropped out a few weeks before the show opened and I offered to step in.  Not because I could act but because I knew how much this play meant to Adam.  I struggled during rehearsals but Adam was very patient with me.  He began to say this one phrase to me over and over and, ultimately, I came to understand it.  This phrase soon changed my life:  “Josh,” he would tell me, “play the process not the result.  Play the process not the result.”

What he meant, of course, is that I was not in the moment. I was “acting” the emotions, the “results,” rather than being fully present in the play.  Once I began to really listen to and experience what was happening to me, as my character, I began to feel the character’s emotions.  This process guided me effortlessly towards the desired result.

Since then, I have used this mantra that Adam taught me for everything.  It has helped me whenever I have felt a little uncertain about my next move as a company or as a person.

When considering a new path for Little Airplane, I try not to be guided by some abstract goal of success or ratings or toy sales.  I just go inside myself and ask, what do I feel like making right now.  Sometimes it’s a song, a few lines of dialogue or I see an image of a character in my head.

Over the years I have found that if I trust these impulses and I make those things, they will lead me naturally to the plotline or the characters and will become our next show.

If I play the process, the results will naturally follow.

When it comes to traditional stop-motion animation, you could say that Manchester is the center of the universe.  This region has spawned such extraordinary companies as Mackinnon and Saunders (”Corpse Bride,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox”), Cosgrove Hall (”Little Robots,” “Engie Benjy”) and HOT Animation (”Bob the Builder,” “Thomas the Tank Engine”).  The talent base here is, quite simply, the best in the world.  So I was thrilled to get on a plane with Tom Brown, Little Airplane’s Head of Production, and fly to Manchester to have a look around the animation scene and get a tour of the incredible new development known as MediaCity UK, future home to our friends and colleagues at BBC Children’s.

On our first evening in Manchester, Tim Newns, our host from the Manchester Investment and Development Agency Service (MIDAS), took us down an icy alleyway to sample the local cuisine:  tapas.  We were greeted outside the restaurant by an elderly woman in a cowboy Santa hat smoking a cigarette.  She spoke to us like our long lost British grandmother and, before we knew it, we had all become fast friends.  As I soon learned, such experiences are not uncommon in the warm, quirky and creative culture that is Manchester.

During dinner, we somehow got to know George from the next table over who runs Circus, best known for being “the smallest pub in Manchester.”  (George produced a well-worn newspaper article to prove this claim.)  George was having his annual post-Christmas party for his colorful staff (which explained the cowboy Santa hat).  By the time coffee was served, George was standing by our table with one of his colleagues who performed slight-of-hand magic for us with cards, coins and odd bits of red foam rubber.

I could see the worried look on Tim Newn’s face.  He was thinking, “Josh is going to think that Manchester is completely nuts.”  But I didn’t think it was nuts.  I thought it was wonderful.  And I knew that such an evening could never have happened in New York or London where George and his staff (who were right out of “The Iceman Cometh”), might have been thrown out of a tapas restaurant.

Over the next two days, I came to understand that these sorts of eccentric, welcoming personalities are exactly what this region of Great Britain is known for.  Manchester is “Coronation Street,” the popular long-running ITV series and I completely enjoyed every minute of it.

Tom and I spent our first full day touring a variety of Manchester-based studios and meeting some of the local indies including RedVision, Startdotstar and The Neighbourhood.  What impressed me most was not only the very high quality of the work they were producing but the fact that they all seemed to get along with one another.  Ben Davies, Managing Director of The Neighbourhood, even named his company “The Neighbourhood” because he said he viewed it as part of a community of local creative companies all striving to make the best work possible.

I also got the opportunity to spend some time over lunch with Ian Mackinnon of Mackinnon and Saunders.  If you do not yet know about Ian’s company, I’d encourage you to Google them.  Ian and his business partner, Peter Saunders, design and build the very best stop-motion characters on the planet.  They are now working on their own preschool show, “Rah Rah the Noisy Lion” with my dear friend Keith Chapman.

Tom and I explored a variety of really amazing building sites in Manchester including “The Hive,” a brand new complex of offices and studios designed specifically for digital media companies.  We got to suit up like the Village People (which I found a little more exciting than I probably should have) and we stomped around the site in hardhats.

The highlight of this tour was when our burly guide, Oliver Butler, began singing the “Baby Jordan Song,” from “3rd & Bird!”  Apparently his son Fred (pictured below) is a very big fan of this show, which we make for CBeebies in New York and London.  I can’t begin to tell you how good it feels to have a stranger in a new country sing a song from one of your shows.  It just makes all the hard work worthwhile.

The really big news in this region is the development of MediaCity UK, a small city comprised of offices, production facilities, apartments and retail stores just across the canal from Manchester in Salford Quays.  As many of you know, I am a very big fan of being by the water, so I just loved this location.  Imagine if you will the Sydney Harbor but, in exactly the place where the Sydney Opera House is, there stands the gorgeous new building that will soon be home to the team from BBC Children’s.  That’s what MediaCity looks like:  A pearl on the canal’s rugged coastline.

Tom and I got to suit up like construction workers for the second day in a row (no less thrilling) and we were given a complete tour of MediaCity by Jason Legget of the Peel Media Group, who own and run the entire development.

Peel is a commercial organization that builds and operates airports and shopping malls throughout the world, so they are no strangers to designing for large groups of people.  From what we saw, Peel is sparing no expense to insure that this will be an irresistible hub for a wide variety of media companies who are currently considering MediaCity UK for their new global headquarters.  The BBC, in fact, is expected to lease only 20-30% of the space at MediaCity.  The rest will be for local and international companies.

I suspect this all sounds very corporate to many of you and you’re probably wondering why a small indie with a penchant for old red brick buildings like Little Airplane would even consider having offices in a new complex like MediaCity UK.  I wondered the same thing.  But Jason explained to us that several of the buildings in MediaCity have been earmarked for indies and one of Peel’s goals is to insure that indies are an integral part of MediaCity UK.

As proof of this commitment, Peel has a wide variety of flexible, low cost spaces that can be built out as needed for either animation or live-action production.  One of these buildings, The Pie Factory, was once the home to a big bakery that produced little meat pies for Tesco, a UK supermarket.  Tom and I saw firsthand that this building is already being used by an array of small and mid-sized media companies that are currently in production on both commercials and original series.

When Tom and I returned to London, everyone seemed puzzled by the fact that we were actively considering a move to Manchester.  But our reasons are simple.  Though we have studios in London and New York, we believe that having an additional studio in Manchester that is staffed by the very best storyboard artists, designers and animators in the UK will be a very valuable (and fun) new asset for our company.  (Not to mention that rent is way cheaper in the north.)

But, perhaps even more importantly, we like to be where the action is.  And I believe that the action in the kids’ TV business in the next ten years will be in MediaCity and the Greater Manchester area.  In fact, I’m willing to bet on it.  So Tom and I will be back very soon.  If everything goes as planned, we hope to have a small outpost here before the year’s end.  Is it a gamble?  Certainly.  But no more so than opening up in New York or London.  And, as they say in the Lotto commercials, “You gotta be in it to win it!”

If anyone has questions about our trip or would like more information, please feel free to write a comment or question below or e-mail me at josh@littleairplane.com.  If you’d like to take your own tour of Greater Manchester, I suggest contacting the following individuals.  They are wonderful guys and I suspect they’ll be happy to hear from you.

Tim Newns of MIDAS Manchester: Tim.Newns@Midas.org.uk

Jason Legget of MediaCity UK: jason.legget@mediacityuk.co.uk

You can also check out this great blog to follow all of the happenings in and around MediaCity UK:  www.mediacityblog.com

If you do make it up to Manchester, please be sure to stop by Circus and tell George that Josh and Tom say “hello.”

The first pint is on us.

Looking forward to seeing all of you at KidScreen!

Josh

Though I do not typically cover breaking news in the blog, I have to make an exception this week.  I was recently informed of an important discovery made by a young Bedouin boy in the desert just outside of the town of Jericho.

The child was playing in an abandoned cave when he uncovered a large earthen jar from circa 200 A.D.

Inside the jar he found a scroll covered in cryptic writing.  Though I am not a religious man, I am including an image of the scroll below.  I believe it may have significance to our industry and provide us all with some much-needed creative and moral guidance. 

I have been traveling for about two weeks now.  I spent a week up in Vancouver and on the Sunshine Coast with my dear friend Cathy Chilco whom many of you know from Sesame Street International.  Cathy and I worked together on the first Israeli-Palestinian Sesame Street co-production back in the late ‘90s before there was a wall and when you could still drive from Jerusalem to Ramallah to eat fajitas.  Cathy and I spent the Christmas week visiting family and friends, exploring the rocky Canadian coastline, drinking Havana Club rum and eating spicy homemade pepperoni from Half Moon Bay.

Now I am down on the Pacific Coast of Mexico with my journal, my Walt Whitman and my sweetheart, Mary.  We are about three hours south of Puerta Vallarta and from our ivy-covered balcony we can see whales playing in the sea.  There is also a strange, brown creature that looks like a cross between an anteater and a Labrador that lopes past us every night at dinnertime looking for a tortilla chip.

Though I have tried very hard to not think about work or preschool television on this trip, my mind invariably drifts back to our studio and all things that happened in 2009.  I was telling Mary this morning that it feels like the experiences of the year get stacked up inside my body like layers of sediment.  And only when I have downtime can I begin to sift through these layers and examine, process and, most importantly, feel all that has happened over the course of the year.  So that’s what I’ve been doing here in Mexico, feeling.  And the ocean has been a helpful ally in this. 

And I’ve also been thinking a lot about what I wanted to say to all of you, my friends and colleagues, in this first blog of the New Year.  I have decided to write about my own hopes for the coming year.  My suspicion is that we are all far more alike than we are different, so I think some of these hopes may resonate as much for you as they do for me.

I hope that I will become a better and more sensitive manager in 2010.  It is sometimes easy for me to forget how much power my words have to my staff.  I have seen how even the smallest compliment or criticism can resonate with someone for months or even years afterwards.  And I hope to be more appreciative of my truly amazing team in the coming year. 

I hope that I will never let the commercial realities of running a business eclipse my personal commitment to making only the highest quality work that my team and I are capable of producing.  I have never been a fan of volume or bigness or money and I hope to never become one.  I hope that I will be able to stay true to our core mission at Little Airplane, which remains a purely creative one.  

I hope that I will be able to find a better balance between making the work I love and spending time with the people I love.  I am very guilty of coming home from work and e-mailing until the wee hours.  I tend to avoid going out with friends unless it’s some special occasion.  I know that this isn’t healthy and I’d like to take a page from my friends at TV PinGuim in Brazil who know how to work hard, play hard and surround themselves with family and friends.  I hope that I can do less working and more living in 2010.

I hope that others in the preschool industry will come to see that they have much more to gain by being open and helpful to others than they do by living with a fortress-under-siege mentality.  I hate to break it to some of my more Machiavellian colleagues but competition is a myth.  It is based on the idea that there are only so many eyeballs or dollars or slots and we have to fight each other for them.  This is simply not true.  There are an infinite number of ways to make and share our work, we just have to remain creative, resourceful and build a strong community.  None of us go it alone, not even the big boys (and big girls) at the big (and not-so-big) networks.  They are as beholden to the great web of creativity and collaboration as the rest of us.  As Cathy likes to say, there is such an abundance everywhere.  I think we all get so preoccupied with staking out our own miserable little patch of dirt that we neglect to see the fields of flowers growing all around us.

So those are my hopes for the New Year.  Corny, sentimental, idealistic.  That’s me.  I invite you all to write some of your own hopes for the New Year in the box provided below. 

I wish you all a happy and healthy 2010.  May all of your shows get high ratings.  May all your toys be in Wal-Mart.   May all your economy seats get upgraded to business class.

Happy New Year to all of you.  Friends, foes and froes.

Josh