Show notes
Canada produces top animation talent but lousy animation content. Animator Adam Hines, co-host of the Guys With Pencils podcast, on how to save Canadian cartoons.
Episode Rundown
00:31 Norman Mclaren (link)
00:41 That’s right, a Canadian made Ren and Stimpy, John K
00:50 Alias, the creators of the 3D modeling and Animation program Maya. Maya has been used in Game of Thrones, Finding Nemo, Frozen and Monsters inc.
01:08 Rocket Robin Hood is a strange thing (link)
Racoons (link)
01:19 The Guys With Pencils podcast (link)
03:31 I dare you to watch this theme and not want to watch all of that series, it’s all on Netflix just to let you know. (link)
04:09 “The Warner Brothers that you know is dead” Hines quoting Paul Dini. Dini also said that Warner Bros doesn’t like large female fan bases (link)
04:18 “Watching cartoons can be a ton of fun, and then you get into the business side of actually making it… It can feel a bit like a death march.” Hines
05:11 Turbo F.A.S.T (link) made by Titmouse (link)
05:27 “In Canada, we have a fraction of the budget and the schedule to make the shows that we make. You hear that as a student and you’re like ‘ok’, but you don’t really have and point of reference or experience.” Hines
05:51 “When I was working on an American production as an animator I had to do 16 seconds a week.16 seconds of good animation, that’s reasonable. I’ve worked on (Canadian) productions that wanted 80 seconds a week.” Hines
06:32 “ I work for this American company (Titmouse) from my living room, it’s freelance. Yet they trusted me more… in Canada a lot of the productions I’ve worked on, you’re more their hands. It’s basically ‘if I could make this by myself I would but I can’t so I’m going to treat you like an extra pair of arms” Hines
09:21 “I love this industry and I love the people that work in it but sometimes it feels a little sweatshoppy.” Hines
09:53 Steve Wolfhard (link) and his comics here (link) (link)
10:17 Adventure Time is Cartoon Network’s top show (link) (link)
10:40 Spoiler Alert, (link)
10:48 “Remember kids’ movies in the 80’s and early 90’s where it’s for kids but real shit happens?” Hines finding a parallel for the serious content on Adventure Time. Mufasa dying still chokes me up.
10:59 “There was a point when I started in the industry and you’d hear execs go ‘we want the next Spongebob’, now they’re saying they want the next Adventure Time.” Hines
11:17 John K’s book about what Jesse was talking about (link)
12:47 “Is there a Canadian show that’s like- ‘that’s the one where we got it right’?” Jesse
“No” Hines
I thought Reboot was a good show.
12:55 “You look at a show like Adventure Time, that’s so out there that it’s brilliant. That show would get noted to death and get changed (in Canada)” Hines
13:15 “ Who’s the client? Who are we making this for? Who’s the client? Who’s the network?” Hines
13:45 “ The people writing for cartoons in Canada- we have to use this union, and to them this is their Mcdonalds job. They all want to be writing movies.” Hines (link)
14:29 “We have world class game studios in this fucking city, and I’m not even talking about Ubisoft which is this big international thing. I’m talking about Capybara and Drinkbox who are making critically acclaim well-selling games as independent studios.” (link) (link)
18:20 “Animators are actors, I would look in a mirror and and would think how does a character move when they’re angry” Jesse chanelling Chuck Jones
19:25 “Are there old systems in place that back then worked but are fucking us now?” Hines.
Looks like Adam was right (link) (link)
19:42 “Lets talk about Adventure Time, that show is probably horrifying to an exec.” Hines
20:47 “If you’re making a video game, theres no government bureau that has to stamp it as a CanCon video game. There’s also not the middle man of a broadcaster. You make a video game, put it on the internet.” Jesse
23:33 “I know with a lot of Canadian TV production, it’s not about having a hit show, it’s about getting a green light. And you get money to make a show and the profits for the production company lie in making it as cheaply as possible and keeping what’s left over.” Jesse
23:57 “One of the shows I worked on ended after 3 seasons and we were under the impression that ratings were good. Apparently this was a really popular show, as far as the studio goes it was a really popular show for them. But they were more interested in cutting it after 3 seasons and put it into syndication.” Hines
24:43 The episode they talk about is here (link)
25:25 “(Ricardo Curtis) Was saying the difference between America and Canada is that in Canada you have a bunch of safety nets, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the attitude of Canadians could be ‘why bother?’. Whereas in America, they have the attitude of ‘why not?’.” Hines
27:05 “You’re an animator working in television who doesn’t have televsion?” Jesse
“No dude, why bother?” Hines
28:00 More on Robert Khoo (link)
30:45 Frederator Studios (link)
31:15 “Let’s work around these roadblocks that we seem to have to deal with in the Canadian ecosystem” Hines
32:02 “ I wonder if we’re going to hit a point where it’s not really possible to have any original Canadian shit and we’re going to become an outsource…We are referred as ‘overseas’ by the States. We are the equivalent of sending it to China or Korea.” Hines
32:26 “We’re like a banana republic for cheap labour.” Jesse
33:45 “See, I fall into this trap too. You see a part of me is ‘we got to make it better, we got to take risks’. But then I’m like ‘fuck, I gotta pay rent.” Hines
33:55 “The reality kinda kicks you in the dreams.” Hines
34:25 Justin Chan is very talented, eat it Hines (link)
Excerpt
Canada produces top animation talent but lousy animation content. Animator Adam Hines, co-host of the Guys With Pencils podcast, on how to save Canadian cartoons.
Show notes
The Score is a digital-first, globally popular Canadian media company that’s growing each year. So why did its well-loved feature writing team just get the axe? Former features editor Dustin Parkes explains.
Episode Rundown
00:00 The Score lays off its feature writing staff (link)
03:13 “I’ll ask you questions and you’ll have to explain it to me like I’m a very slow four year old because with sports, I don’t really know anything.” Jesse
05:38 “We were like, ‘look at these media dinosaurs going out’ and you know what? In two years, we were the dinosaurs.” Parkes
07:15 “In defending my team throughout the last year and a half, I would look at the shares per article. Ours would always be higher, ours would always be more significant. But you know, we cost more money than the average news editor.” Parkes
7:43 “(a news editor) is what used to be called a blogger. They’re the people who are kind of mining for content, mining online, mining Twitter, social media and looking for the breaking stories.” Parkes
8:40 “By the simple metrics, I could see they were generating more page views and a lot more tap throughs on the app, a lot more views online, a lot more shares online overall.” Parkes
10:30 “They found new ways to share on Facebook that were very effective for them and that kind of cut out the need for us as marketers of their product…Facebook recently changed their algorithm for sharing content and they made sharing content for content providers a lot easier. Using hashtags, and made it more like twitter. And that had a profound effect on our traffic numbers.” Parkes
11:53 “They’re selling $2 million per quarter in ads…it’s up 60% from a year ago. And yet when you consider they’re like the number 3 thing in the world in what they’re doing (Chris corrects- they’re currently #7), and they’ve got an audience of 5 or 6 million- in newspaper terms that’s a pittance. And they’re losing $2.7 million every quarter cause their spending over 5 million a quarter. When the numbers are that big…I’m going to make a wild estimate and guess your whole team cost somewhere around half a million dollars a year?” Jesse
“It’s a lot less than that” Parkes
The Star on The Score’s path to profitability (link)
12:30 “They’ve got a 100 people in there (The Score), 30 of them are journalists? So is everyone else a computer programer?” Jesse
12:40 “It’s a modern company in every way” Parkes
“Is that what a modern company is? Is a modern media company a company without journalists?” Jesse
“In a way, it’s starting to shape up this way” Parkes
14:00 “ That which gains the most traction as far as news content goes is the weird stuff, the wacky stuff in sports…What we as the feature writers offer is something a little bit more than that and it’s kind of for the people who have an unhealthy relationship with sports” Parkes
14:49 “(You wrote) an article about the exploitation of young Dominican kids into baseball, that was as good as any magazine journalism I read recently” Jesse (link)
15:26 http://grantland.com/ (Maybe the only sports website I frequent. -Chris)
16:12 The personal blog post Dustin mentions (link)
19:02 “’The market can’t support this type of journalism, we’ve learned this is true’. Actually, you’re talking about specific people called advertisers, who are obsessed with metrics,eyeballs and clicks. They don’t particularly care about the quality of the content, they just want people seeing their ads, and where does the value lie when people ignore display ads?…are we acting like this is the reality of the world when we haven’t educated advertisers and they don’t understand the difference between one kind of click and another?” Jesse
24:15 Some of Dustin’s World Cup coverage (link)
24:50 “To be really honest it’s sports, I mean it’s so meaningless. Like, maybe tabloid journalism is maybe a little bit under it. In the end it’s completely meaningless, it’s at best a distraction.” Parkes
Excerpt
The Score is a digital-first, globally popular Canadian media company that’s growing each year. So why did its well-loved feature writing team just get the axe? Former features editor Dustin Parkes explains.
Show notes
Episode Rundown
0:42 The eulogies of MuchMusic (link) (link) (link)
01:50 Greg O’Brien, Editor & publisher of Cartt.ca (link)
03:12 Moses Znaimer (link)
03:28 Peter Nygard (link)
04:58 “…under their CRTC licence, they have to air 12 hours of music videos everyday. They accepted that when they took ownership of the licence. When they bought it from CityTV” – O’Brien. They call it “Beaver hours” (link)
05:21 “They have to play these music videos. It’s in the logs and they have to prove it to the commission that they play this much hours of music videos.” O’Brien
5:46 (CRTC staffers enforce this) but they only act if someone complains… If someone complains that a channel is violating its licence. You know, if Sportsnet starts showing womens programing or if W network starts showing hockey” – O’Brien referring to how a channel could get in trouble if they broke their licence agreement.
Make your complaints here. (link)
06:38 “It was a cash cow for a long time. Same thing for History, nobody else is allowed to launch, in Canada, a history channel because Shaw owns that genre protected licence” – O’Brien
07:32 (other channels can play videos) “…as long as you don’t call it a music video station or don’t play too many.” – O’Brien.
08:15 “If Shaw has a claim on history, I can’t come into the market with a competing History Channel. Does that mean they have to have history programming? Because when I watch the History Channel, I’m not seeing a ton of educational history stuff.” Jesse
Cracked has the best take of the decline of the History Channel (link)
09:22 “Ice Road Truckers is an historical show because we have historically had ice roads.”
10:01 “In return for launching that channel, because our market is so small, the CRTC would say that it’s your channel, you will be the only one that has that channel. And you’ll be able to go to market free of competition.” O’Brein
10:22 “If we had allowed Comedy Central just to come into Canada, we wouldn’t have a comedy network in Canada.” Some say that would be a good thing.
12:00 “Book Television is the example we use to illustrate the problems in the industry” O’Brein. Follow-up story (link)
12:32 “Book Television has half an employee assigned to it.” (link)
13:21 “It makes about $4.5 million a year on subscriptions because their in these big bundles.” O’Brein talking about Book Television (link)
14:27 This hearing (link)
19:08 “Don’t get so carried away. ‘The government could force us to unbundle it, but you’re not going to save a dime.’ If we’re not going to save a dime, why would they be fighting it so doggedly for years? Obviously they’re afraid of something.” -Jesse
20:01 “Rogers will speak at length about the experiment they did in London (Ontario) where they broke up the packages as best they could…and let people buy one at a time, and hardly anybody took them up on the offer.” O’Brein (link)
25:11 “Given the choice, Canadians choose American programming and, like you say, if we just let the American stations come in here (over the Internet)…Canadians will choose that.” Jesse
26:08 “Disney last week signed a deal with Netflix. Netflix will be the exclusive Canadian partner for all of the animated and live action movies for Disney starting in 2015.” O’Brien (link)
26:54 “The Canadian market is really unique when you look around the world. We are right beside the world’s biggest cultural producer, and we’re the same language.” O’Brien
27:25 Nope, “protectionary” isn’t a word (link)
34:34 “There are two things intended by this CanCon production scheme. One is, it created an industry, and it certainly succeeded in doing that. It totally created a Canadian production industry. And the other thing it’s supposed to do is create Canadian culture that’s supposed to be of value to Canadians. I think we can conclude after a pretty good amount of time that it has failed miserably at creating that culture.” Jesse
35:00 The Littlest Hobo is a rad hobo dog solving small-town problems. It was the dark gritty reboot to Lassie we’ve all wanted (link)
35:05 “It is well past the time where the industry can continue to live on renting American programming. If we’re going to a pick and pay world, you’re going to have to give people a reason to pick and pay for you.” O’Brien
35:20 The Beachcombers circa 1975 (link)
40:01 Showmi hype (link)
Last week, Rogers announced that they were getting out of the snitch business. Until then, the company ratted out its own customers to government agencies hundreds of thousands of times every year. Without asking for a warrant, Rogers provided subscriber data to authorities that linked real names to all kinds of private online expression and activity. On a previous episode of CANADALAND, The Citizen Lab’s Christopher Parsons described the common practice among telecom companies of charging police and other agencies a fee of $5-$15 each time they came knocking.
The Supreme Court has since ruled that this kind of warrantless information sharing is an illegal violation of individual privacy. Only then did Rogers desist, and I took the opportunity to remind people just what they had been up to, over a period of time that we learned in today’s Toronto Star stretches back to at least 2006. Here’s what I tweeted:
This is huge. Rogers previously sold the data of 100s of thousands of customers to police w/out warrants. No more. bit.ly/Wb3PF3
I soon received a public response from “Chris @ Rogers” (@Rogers_Chris), an official Rogers social media presence who I will assume is an actual person.
@JesseBrown We do not sell data to police, we comply with the law and respond to legally valid requests from police.
Of course, in complying with thousands (millions?) of warrantless police requests, the highest court in the country has ruled that Rogers was in fact not complying with the law, but let’s leave that aside for a moment and deal with the matter in contention: was subscriber data provided by Rogers for free, or did police pay for it? Suspecting that Chris was relying on some semantic quibble about the difference between the terms “charging a fee” and “selling,” I asked for clarity in my response:
@Rogers_Chris do you charge a fee of any kind when supplying basic subscriber data?
Chris wrote back suggesting that we take the conversation private. He promised to have someone “more familiar” with this issue follow up with me via email. That was last Thursday.
I’m still waiting.
UPDATE – JULY 28 –
A Rogers rep, Kevin Spafford, got in touch after I posted the article above. He confirmed that “in some cases we charge a minimal fee” when providing law enforcement officials with customer data. When asked how much this fee is and how often it is charged, Spafford declined to provide details, answering instead that the fee varies depending on the amount of work required to provide the information, and that “in most cases” no fee is charged. Given the enormous volume of data requests, this leaves much room for interpretation, leaving the public in the dark as to whether Rogers has been collecting hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars in return for providing information to police on its customers.
CANADALAND has obtained internal CBC documents illustrating how the organization is dealing with employee tension, rage and confusion.
Here is CBC News’ “Digital Mantra”, also titled “CBC Digital Strategy in 3 Slides” (link)
Here is management’s attempt to answer questions submitted by employees following last month’s employee town hall (link).
The CBC work atmosphere has by all accounts hit a new low since the town hall, where employees hoped to learn whether or not they would be keeping their jobs. Instead, they were forced to endure President Hubert Lacroix’s “Vision 2020” unveiling, a smokescreen of digital futurism bafflegab that obscured the painful truth, that 1500 unspecified positions will be eliminated over the next 5 years. While each employee waits to find out if they’re getting the axe, they are expected to internalize and execute the CBC’s “digital mantra”, which will result in news content designed for phones and tablets, somehow (it has to do with “pillars” and “planks”).
A couple of brave (doomed?) workers actually piped up to demand Lacroix’s resignation for running the whole enterprise into the ground (he refused) and the whole affair was hustled to a premature close as questions were still being hurled at the stage.
Employees were assured that all queries would be answered if submitted via email. The results of that process have since been posted to the CBC’s iO! employee intranet and then leaked to CANADALAND.
The full document is a slog of mendacious, obfuscatory doublespeak. So, for your reading pleasure here are the
TOP 5 BAFFLING BITS OF CBC MANAGEMENT JIBBERISH
1. “The strategy is a plan, not a blueprint.”
Those are just synonyms.
How about: “the scheme is a gambit, not a ploy” or “the excuse is a justification, not an alibi”?
Take into consideration the context, and it’s even more angry-making. Here’s the employee question it purports to answer: “If you don’t have any specific, concrete numbers about how this will impact us, why are you sharing the strategy?” In other words: you still haven’t told us who’s getting fired, so why are you bothering us with this digital future horseshit? Why? Because this isn’t a blueprint, people- just a plan. We call it a strategy.
2. “We are keeping incentive-based compensation for managers…to provide an accountability framework to drive the successful achievement of the Corporation’s annual objectives”
….and that’s why your boss will still be getting her bonus while you’re getting shit-canned. Amazing how management types needs incentives beyond their generous salaries to achieve their goals. Everybody else is expected to do their job because it’s their job.
3. “We are in the content business, not the infrastructure business.”
This lies at the core of the lie. The Vision 2020 plan appropriates the media-exec mantra of the moment: that progressive shops are all about content, cuz the game is no longer about having the most powerful transmitters, the widest network, or the biggest pipes. Let us all be “device agnostic”, let us simply create the best product out there and the people will gobble it up on whichever screen or gadget they choose.
If backed by deed, that would actually be a plan. The CBC could shed massive amounts of legacy costs by selling off its TV infrastructure entirely. Without channels across the country to technically maintain and fill with content, the Ceeb could focus instead on quality, nimbly creating only as much video as it needs and wants to, then providing it as streaming video and through podcasts and through a Netflix-like app. But that’s not the plan. The actual plan is the opposite: the CBC plans to get out of original video content production entirely, news and current affairs excepted, and buy content from outside production companies. They will then become a middleman, using public funds to buy privately-made content, which will then be broadcast over their public infrastructure. They are actually doubling down on infrastructure and abandoning content production.
4. “As the strategy takes shape, there is the need to challenge and rethink the organization design to ensure that the structure, roles, people, processes and reward systems support and enable the overall plan.”
This is less than meaningless, and seems little more than a dodge to the posed question:
“How will CBC work to attract and keep younger / new workers with skills in these fields amongst layoffs that will again ensure that employees with the longest seniority are kept employed, regardless of their abilities to work in digital spaces?”
Or: how does the CBC intend to become such a hip digital company when union rules make sure that younger workers will be the first ones to get laid off? Those with the most seniority reserve the right to “bump” newer hires, even when it means axing someone with digital skills from a digital position and replacing them with an older and more expensive worker who must then be trained. This literally results in 50-year-old video editors trying to write code and getting paid six figure salaries to stumble through it.
5. “CBC’s people are our most precious resource.”
This smug nugget is management’s response to employee outrage over being invited to ask questions about a strategy they were given access to a mere hour before the town hall occurred, and which contained little hard data about where the axe will fall. The whole enterprise of unveiling an exciting new plan for the future as it sheds hundreds of jobs shows the CBC’s workers just how precious they really are to management. It’s like telling your girlfriend all about the awesome new apartment you’ll be moving into after you break up with her.
Jennifer McGuire singles out one critic, ignores the rest
The Globe and Mail Editorial Board unanimously agreed to endorse a minority Liberal government for the Ontario provincial election but was overruled at deadline by Editor-in-Chief David Walmsley.
Globe executives want to monetize the integrity and reputations of The Globe and Mail’s journalists – the same award-winning reporters and editors that management proudly (and rightly) claims are vital to the enterprise’s future as a powerful, independent, fearless and profitable news organization.
