Entering its 15th year, the Banff Television Festival’s International Market Simulation is a must-attend event at the festival and has been transplanted at various programming conferences around the world.

The Market Simulation offers producers the opportunity to pitch their projects to an international audience of programmers, financiers and buyers. Not only do producers get to suss out potential interest, but with ringleader Pat Ferns urging the international broadcasting reps to lay down some cash, anything can happen – including the producers’ dream of landing a development deal on the spot.

Three projects in the drama and entertainment genre will be pitched at this year’s Market Simulation, with an additional three in the documentary, kids’ and educational programming category.

Following are some of the projects stepping up to the pitcher’s mound. . .

Somewhere along the lines of Back to the Future and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures comes Ruby’s Hat. This family adventure series follows 13-year-old Ruby who, along with two unlikely friends, runs away from her adoptive family in search of her birth parents. Through the use of a virtual reality hat, she goes back to the roots of her family tree, where she navigates through the branches of her ancestry to solve the mystery of her past.

Still in the ‘active development stage’ at Toronto’s Deer Park Communication, in association with Alyse & Her Big Ideas, executive producers David Brady and Tim O’Brien of Deer Park and Alyse Rosenberg are heading to Banff in search of a North American broadcaster.

‘I’d love it for Disney, Showtime, hbo, Fox Kids or cbc,’ says Rosenberg.

Although no financing or distribution deals have been finalized, ‘we have numerous potential partners right now and we are confident that we’ll come to Banff with half our budget in place,’ says Brady, who was in Europe negotiating with coproduction partners from the u.k. and France at the time he spoke to Playback.

The project includes 26 half-hour episodes, budgeted at $500,000 per.

Rosenberg says the team is eyeing a coproducer with a strong educational arm to help support their broad vision, which includes Internet, cd-rom and merchandising possibilities.

‘We’re looking at designing a website for kids to research their own family trees.’

And because Ruby traces her routes back to Europe, the project lends itself to an international coproducer.

‘Ideally, we’re looking to go into production next winter, but where depends on our coproduction partner. If it’s France, we’ll split location,’ says Rosenberg, who’s so caught up with getting her pitch together for Banff she has yet to think up a prototype for Ruby. Samantha Yaffe