Toronto’s Sinking Ship Entertainment (SSE) has teamed up with Australia prodco Gristmill to coproduce the live-action series Lightning Primary.

The 10 x 30-minute adventure series, aimed at six- to nine-year-olds, marks the first official Canadian-Australian copro for both companies.

Gristmill will film the series in Australia, while SSE will be responsible for the visual effects in Canada.

The series takes place in a school that has been hit by lightning, transforming it into a magical realm — where the class pet can now sing and geysers of water shoot from the sprinklers.

Gristmill originally developed Lightning Primary, which was one of 16 projects to receive a combined funding of US$326,000 from the Australian Children’s Television Foundation in 2021.

Gristmill is the prodco behind mystery-comedy series The Inbestigators (20 x 30 minutes), co-commissioned by Netflix and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), while SSE has produced more than a dozen shows and distributed its own series Dino Dana and Odd Squad worldwide.

This story originally appeared in Kidscreen

Image courtesy Gristmill/ Sinking Ship Entertainment