Rene Holder

Animation producer
Farr Creative
Estonia/Trinidad & Tobago

Pitching: Howzzat!
 
What is the biggest issue facing the animation industry?
Representation. With regards to the Black Lives Matter movement, a lot of questions are being asked about who is telling stories and who gets to tell the kind of stories that we want. While it’s an issue, it’s also a great opportunity for black, indigenous and people of colour to tell their stories, and they’re getting a lot more opportunities as well as a result.

What is your company doing in response to this?
It has allowed us to lean towards these opportunities, because there are a lot more opportunities for different stories to be told. Once one voice is being heard, it raises other voices around it as well. For us, because there’s been this shift, it’s giving a lot more opportunities for people in the Caribbean, or even just people of colour anywhere, to be heard outside of Western centres.

What impact could the Covid-19 pandemic have on the animation industry long-term?
The opportunities for remote working and a distributed workforce have increased significantly. Larger companies are seeing that all of the infrastructure that they needed to have, maybe it can be re-allocated online and with the same output.

How are subscription video-on-demand services changing the animation industry?
It’s great, but I always question how long it will last. There are so many more opportunities for creators and animators to be part of the industry and to create content. But there isn’t a lot of information about how much this content is acquired for in terms of cost. So the question really is, with so much content being bought, is it being bought for a fair price? Are the deals actually making sense for the producers?

Tell us about the project you are pitching at Cartoon Forum.
Howzzat! (24×22′) is set after the Great Collapse, when the colonies are held together by a love of cricket, which is so strong that it has influenced every aspect of society. Cricket is not just a game but the deciding factor upon which a winning colony has political sway, funding and media dominance. We follow a cricket prodigy and the rest of the newly formed junior squad of misfits as they attempt to restore the lowest-ranked colony team to their former glory on the road to the Cricket World Cup.