How a Random Call Led to a Series

In October 2011, I was heading to New York to see a reading of my TV pilot, Archangel in the Irish Rep. The reading was being produced by - and driven by - the wonderful Anna Nugent (who played the lead role) and Paul Nugent.

Because I know virtually no-one in New York, I put a call out through LinkedIn - anyone want to meet in New York on these dates? - and ended up meeting Natascha Crandall, an educational consultant who worked with children's (mostly animation) series. (It's an impressive list: Nickelodeon’s Peter Rabbit, Zack and Quack, Bubble Guppies, The Backyardigans, The Wonder Pets, CBeebies’ Bing Bunny, The Octonauts, Sesame Tree, Sprout’s Driftwood Bay, and many Sesame Workshop.)

We had a lovely chocolate-filled meeting in a cafe that seemed to make everything - main courses, starters, every type of dessert with chocolate. I talked to her about WULFIE - currently in development with Monster Entertainment, with MEDIA support- and PUNKY (Geronimo Animation; second series is being officially launched February 3rd on RTE Junior alongside another series I worked on, WILDERNUTS (Kavaleer)). We talked about life in general - y'know, hopes, dreams, aspirations, need for chocolate on a regular basis - and decided we'd love to work together.

Roll on to last February. She had people interested in ideas and did I have any? Well, Wulfie was gone so I started firing ideas out of the ether -- far easier than getting them produced! -- and one of them stuck. ROXY & ROWENA. I did a bible, she pulled together an amazing curriculum in its support and we began to talk to animators.

And now, in little over a week it's off to Kidscreen! As if it's all grown up and ready to leave home! Natascha will be pitching it - so far - to Sprout, PBS, Zodiak, Sixteen South, Nick UK and Hulu.

And yesterday I got final animation from the wonderful artist,  Larry Ruppel (see pic to left) so now the bible can be finished.

It kills me that I won't be there to pitch this series alongside Natascha! It's a pretty personal project and a very sweet one and wouldn't it be amazing if it got picked up?!



At least it will be in good company because its older cousins WULFIE - an amazing project now after nearly eight months of development - and PUNKY will be will be somewhere there too.