Leading up to The Rockies, which will be presented during the Banff World Media Festival June 10 to 13, Playback caught up with some of the nominees to talk about their projects.

Here, John Leitch, president of Radical Sheep Productions and executive producer for the kid’s property Stella and Sam, which is nominated in the animation category, talks to Playback about creating a successful international kid’s show.

PB: What does it mean to be nominated?

JL: As you may know, we were nominated and won last year. This one is particularly interesting given that it’s an international panel that’s determining the winners. That fact in itself gives the award lots of weight and we’re very proud of it.

PB: How did you get here?

JL: The short answer is I think we’ve made a great show.

It’s based on the award-winning book series written and illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay. So we’re coming from a strong place. The art from the books themselves is very strong and the books have been transferred quite effectively to screen

It’s also a show that has a very broad international appeal.

PB: Was it your intention for the show to become such an international hit?

JL: It’s always our hope that there’s an international appeal. We want to sell the show to as many markets as we can.

In the first place, we look for properties that have really strong characters. And at the end of the day, we hope that those strong characters will have a generalized international appeal.

PB: What, in your opinion, creates a successful kids property?

JL: Character, character, character. We were provided this gift from Marie-Louise. There were strong characters that were already defined in the books. We’ve been very true to those characters when we’ve taken it from book to screen.

My own opinion is that there are many properties out that that may have a strong story or series arc, but it’s almost like we could insert any character from any show in those roles and it would work. So we’ve been very vigilant when we have scripts that come into us that we always ask ourselves if this is something that Sam and Stella would do.

PB: How important is a transmedia approach?

JL: The answer to that is it depends. Transmedia is a buzzword that we hear at all of the conferences that we go to.

My own view is that not all properties work well on all media. So we’ve been very selective in terms of where we felt Stella and Sam could work and where the stories that we’re telling on the TV can also be effectively translated into iPad apps or websites.

We’ve also brought on our digital media partners early on. It was never an afterthought for us.

So if you look at what we’ve done with our apps through zinc Roe, it’s the same animation services facility that has done the animation. It’s the same writers that write the TV series. It’s the same actors who are voicing the characters. We try to ensure that there’s a seamless approach [to transmedia].

PB: What do you have in the works?

JL: We have a fantastic new series called Yub Yubs. It’s currently in development with Disney Jr. It was originally a new media project, but came to us through [new technology kids entertainment studio] Industrial Brothers [based in Toronto].

These are two-minute episodes, and they’re absolutely stunning. We expect to be in production on the series shortly.