In the last post I gave you a little bit of a background as to how the new kids TV show, Shane the Chef came into existence. Those very first moments that resulted in this show appearing 13 years later. I mentioned that there were a couple of people in those early days that were key in the forward momentum of Shane. So lets go back…
Its 2005 and I am working in an animation studio in London. First thing is, how did I end up there? Simple. It is because I had worked for many years with a comics writer called Simon Furman. We had worked on a whole load of Transformers comic books together and always got on well creatively and personally. He had made some in-roads into TV and one of the people he had worked with was looking for someone to design some characters for a new animated kids show called Legend of the Dragon. I was approached and accepted the challenge. So I turn up on my first day and am slightly confronted by it all. Not only working in a studio in London (having worked for most of my career at home drawing comics) but with a whole load of people I don’t know and in an industry that is all new to me. I meet the people who are setting it up. And this is where it gets interesting. The producer in that studio and who I mentioned in the previous post is a guy named David Freedman. The director is an American by the name of Geoff Marsh (more of him later) and there are other notable animation professionals. Of those people it is David that I present the idea of a kids show with a food theme to and he likes the idea so much that he also offers to not only put me in touch with a writer but also to act as an advisor that I can ask questions of if and when needed. So he puts me in touch with a writer who he knows that has worked on a lot of TV shows and has made a name for himself as one of the main writers on Bob the Builder. As I said last time, he is a writer that I have worked with before many years ago on a Doctor Who comic strip. His name is Simon Jowett. Not sure that we had ever met before but we arrange to get together so that I can run my idea past him.
The original (Jeff) logo
To be honest I don’t actually remember where and when we met up to talk about what was then called Jeff the Chef. But needless to say Simon (that’s Jowett not Furman) likes the idea and set to work fleshing it all out. I still have the original pitch document somewhere. If I bump into it I will post it here so that you can see how true we remained to our original idea. One of the key things that Simon first did was to really get to grips with the background intention of the show. He consolidated my thoughts about how to best present the ‘good food’ angle. He also (if memory serves) introduced the idea of Jeff having a daughter to make it more engaging to a young audience. I can’t remember at what point Jeff’s dad, ‘Pop’ got axed. Pop was a really important character for me for personal reasons and I wanted to keep him but all was not lost as the essence of who he was finally appeared as a character called JG. And in many ways he is a far better character.
Anyway… Its still roughly 2005 or maybe 2006 and we are pitching it around. Simon knows a few people and gets us a meeting with a couple of key players, the first of which is Jocelyn Stevenson. She is top dog at HIT, who make Bob the Builder. We have a meeting and we take along our nice little printout of Jeff the Chef. I have bound it nicely together and put a Jeff the Chef logo on the front. We are invited into her office and sit at a little round meeting table. (Just so you know, Simon requested a meeting with her but didn’t tell her what it was he was pitching). Introductions are made and she asks Simon “So what have you got for me then?” He slides the nicely bound pitch document, complete with illustrations, across the table. She looks down at the logo on the front and shakes her head. Yikes! Inside I am verging on crestfallen as it looks to me as though she doesn’t like it. She looks up at us, pauses and says… “I wish I’d thought of that”.
So I am sure you can imagine, I was really excited. Acknowledgement of our idea from such an industry leader is exactly what we need. But there was a catch. She was moving on from HIT and and was not in a position to commission anything. The meeting was great but was not to bear any fruit. Where to next? will let you know in the next post 🙂
By the way. A fun little side note. That Director in the London studio that I worked with for a while. His name was Geoff but everybody called him Swampy. A couple of years later when we all left that studio I was moving ahead getting work elsewhere but Swampy, well Swampy had this great, fun idea that he had put together with a friend. He showed me the little doddles of the characters for his proposed cartoon and showed me the scratchy little animatic that they had put together with him and his friend doing the voices. He did well with his little idea. It got picked up by Disney and became the show called… Phineas and Ferb. Awesome eh?
NEXT: Where we went next with our little idea.