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. . .

Based on the best-selling book The Dancing Universe, from Creation Myths to the Big Bang, penned by Brazilian cosmologist Dr. Marcelo Gleiser, The Dancing Universe is a three-part docuseries, budgeted at us$400,000 per hour.

‘We already have a third of the budget from Discovery Latin America and Brazilian tv (tve) and I expect that pbs will bring in the rest. We’re in negotiations right now,’ says Leslie Weiner, producer and director of international development for VM Productions in Paris.

Hosted by Gleiser, the series takes a look back at the myths of creation, reconnecting the religious roots of science to its most advanced ideas about the cosmos.

‘It will do for cosmology what The Human Body did for biology,’ says Weiner.

Still in development, the series will be shot across the globe, starting in New Zealand and moving on to India, South America, Poland, Italy. . .

‘In Banff, we hope to find a Canadian coproducer because we’ll also be shooting a lot on the American continent,’ says Weiner.

And because the series will be garnished with special effects, used to illustrate theories of creation and concepts of physics, Weiner is hoping to partner up with a special effects house like Discreet Logic.

Julio Worchan of Brazil-based Synapse Productions is Weiner’s coproducer on the project and TV Zero in Brazil has also jumped on board.

vm, a leader in the production of scientific programming for French tv, was founded seven years ago by bio-engineer Nicolas Goldzahl and mathematician Pascal Nguyen-Nhon. Among its many achievements, the company has become famous for e=m6, a science magazine series broadcast on M6 in France for the past eight years.

Also gaining in celebrity status, Gleiser was recently featured on God Only Knows, an Equinox series for Channel 4, and the bbc/pbs program Stephen Hawking’s Universe.