For those Bourbon St. bound this month, pages 12-14 offer a wrap of some of the new projects Canadian companies will be shopping at NATPE in New Orleans Jan. 25 to 28.

Versions of these stories also appear in the Winter 1999 issue Playback International.

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Student Bodies, a youth-oriented series from Montreal’s Telescene Film Group, is entering its third season of production. With 65 episodes available by April 1999, 20th Century is gearing up to begin selling the series into syndication at NATPE as a five-days-a-week stripped show for the 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. after-school slot.

The idea for Student Bodies developed over three years ago when Telescene representatives met with 20th Century president Rich Jacobson and senior vp John Macdonald to find out what type of programming the company was looking for.

20th Century was interested in a teen vehicle, a viable, long-term program that would begin as a once-a-week series and down the road could be stripped Monday to Friday. Telescene returned with a pitch for a combined live-action/animation series in which a group of high school students creates an underground comic book parodying their high school life.

The deal for Student Bodies was structured as a 50/50 partnership between Telescene and 20th Century. Both companies would equally finance the $350,000 (us$227,000) per episode budget. As creator of the project, Telescene owns all copyright.

Telescene would handle Canadian and international distribution (Telescene made a deal with Sunbow in New York to sell the series internationally) while 20th Century took the u.s. Each company took a fee for distributing in their territories and shares equally in profits. A shared window was worked out with Canadian broadcasters CanWest Global and ytv to air the program.

‘We offered an attractive business arrangement,’ says Telescene’s Michael Yudin. ‘A 50/50 relationship limits the risk on both sides and makes for a partnership as opposed to a buyer/seller relationship. Everyone has the same interests and stakes in the project. No one is trying to sell anything to each other during the making of the series.’

Student Bodies is now entering its profit phase through syndication, in which a show is sold individually market by market and station by station.

It will be syndicated on a barter basis where the station buys the program and takes half the commercial time to sell to local advertisers and the syndicator holds on to the other half of the time and puts it together with its other markets and sells to national advertisers.

Telescene and 20th Century will split all profits from syndication.

The deal with 20th Century got Telescene in the door at Fox Family Channel, says Yudin.

Telescene successfully pitched Misguided Angels, a series following the misadventures of two odd-couple angels who attempt to re-earn their wings, and Big Wolf on Campus, a family sitcom in which a high school senior is turned into a werewolf as the result of a freak wolf attack.

Unlike Student Bodies, Telescene holds all distribution rights on the two programs, with Fox Family only kicking in a broadcast licence for 26 episodes of each series. Both projects have budgets of $620,000 per half-hour, financed internally by Telescene through its recent public offering, which raised $33 million.

Misguided Angels and Big Wolf are licensed exclusively to Fox Family in the u.s., but once this agreement lapses, Telescene, which owns u.s. distribution rights, will sell the program into syndication.

Telescene signed an international sales agreement with New York-based The Fremantle Corporation, which will distribute both series in all markets outside North America.

Yudin says Telescene works with different distributors depending on the project. Fremantle was chosen because of its long-running and successful experience selling such shows as Baywatch to foreign markets.

Production is currently underway in Montreal on both series for air beginning in January ’99. A broadcast deal in Canada has not been completed although discussions are underway with Global and ytv.