Screen Accelerator Project

The key focus was supporting and coaching our screen sector participants to commercialize their IP, with the ultimate aim of bringing in productions to create jobs in the Wellington region. The genre of unscripted TV content is the fastest growing and highest grossing income return at present as it encapsulates real-life environments that attract large audience bases and can be created without elaborate or costly production processes. There is extremely high demand across the global streaming platforms for these types of shows, specifically documentaries, docu-series, docu-dramas, game shows and competitive series like cooking shows, dating shows as well as travelling shows and social experiments. Also, both here and internationally the screen industry is often ‘built’ from these types of well-funded formatted shows, where funding is good and crews can develop their skills on set.  The critical business skills established throughout this process are highly transferable and are effectively production management skills – which can be utilised across a vast majority of business models and meet the increasing need for producers and line producers within the NZ screen sector.

The project was successfully facilitated by Emmy award winning and L.A Producer, Jon Kroll (Gordon Ramsey Unchartered, for National Geographic and Disney Plus, The Amazing Race, and ‘Big Brother’ etc), who did a wonderful job in terms of collaborating with us to plan and design the weekly sessions and delivering the content alongside our impressive range of guest speakers, with support from the Wellington Creative and Lane Street Studios teams.

Our group of 15 participants were screen sector practitioners each at varying stages in their careers – we had some were graduates, some emerging talent and everything right through to highly seasoned experts. Some were individual practitioners operating as freelance contractors and others came from established production houses in the Wellington region. They were a diverse and talented group that had a range of interesting and exciting unscripted series ideas.

The programme successfully taught our participants how to develop and pitch unscripted television shows targeted for U.S buyers, with an emphasis on content that can be produced in Wellington, using local talent and resources. This is a ground breaking project that offered a genuine opportunity to pitch content ideas to active buyers, rather than just solely practise pitching.