SET- UP | ED I NBURGH TV FEST I VAL
WISE UP TO CONTENT We visited this industry favourite festival to give you the low-down on what’s coming next in the world of telly
WORDS ZENA OLI AN I / PICTURES WI LL GREEN
T he word festival in the film and TV world conjures up images of at the annual Edinburgh TV Festival the screening rooms are swapped for lecture halls, the awards are glass and the after- parties… Scottish? Indeed, this is a different kind of festival to what most filmmakers are accustomed to: successes of the past year are discussed rather than screened, the focus is firmly fixed on the future and for many attendees a good festival means coming home with a six-figure commission. COMMISSIONING INERTIA Running from 22 to 24 August, this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival saw the Edinburgh International Conference Centre swarmed by thousands of producers, writers, directors, students and more from across the globe. The overwhelming focus of the festival is on commissioning so it’s particularly useful for those directly involved in pitching and content creation. With panel sessions and 1:1 meetings bookable in advance, the TV festival offers a unique chance to find out from a broad spectrum of controllers and commissioners exactly what they’re looking for – well, that’s the theory at least. press-filled screening rooms, golden awards and glitzy after-parties. But
The festival is useful for those directly involved with pitching and content creation
In reality a lot of the commissioning sessions blurred into one another, with decision makers from different channels all seemingly singing from the same hymn sheet, professing that they’re not afraid to ‘take risks’, are especially looking for ‘unique access’ and welcome ‘celebrity- driven vehicles’. It’s a shame, really, as you can’t help but feel that those commissioners will be decidedly underwhelmed by the generic pitches they receive following the festival. There seems to be this awkward cat-and-mouse game at work whereby commissioners don’t exactly tell producers what they want (though they have an idea) and producers tentatively offer up a buffet of ideas that probably aren’t quite what the commissioner had in mind. Although not being able to predict what the decision maker is looking for could be as much to do with postmodernism and the notion that there are no new ideas, as Discovery ID’s Sara Kozak said, “Don’t just send me one idea. Send me 13 ideas because I can guarantee that the first 12 [ideas] someone else has already pitched to me.”
ABOVE The Edinburgh TV Festival remains a ‘must be at’ event if you want to learn more about the mystical art of commissioning.
14 DEF I N I T ION | OCTOBER 20 1 8
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