Welcome to another Telecast, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of television production and all the incredible talent shaping what we watch. I'm Justin Crosby and on today's episode I'm joined by Tom Mild and Adrian Carter from the renowned Canadian production company, Sharp T-films. Known for their innovative storytelling and distinctive approach to factual and unscripted content, Sharp T-films has carved out a name for themselves in the industry. Tom, Adrian, welcome to the show.
Not at all, you're fresh off the flight from Canada, you're in town this morning. Yeah, well, thank you for making Telecast T-films first stop on lots of meetings that you're going to do in London. So, you guys have having an amazing time of seeing in lots of news in the trade press, etc. about Sharp T-films.
So first of all, for those who don't know about Sharp T, tell us about the company. Sharp T-3 have been around close to 15 years. Is this our 15th year? Yeah, and March will be 15 years.
Yeah, and we initially worked in the US market. We were our main customers in the Discovery portfolio, Food Network, Animal Planet. We did a couple of series for them, Travel Channel. So very much pitching, creating, developing with the development teams and all those networks.
So mainly cable networks, right? How do we start? How do we start? US cable.
Right, okay. And yeah, that was fruitful for many years. No, many years. Yeah.
Okay, and so Tom, looking back at your journey, is there a particular project that changed things for you? And give us a run through about some of the shows that people might be familiar with. Well, I mean, we had a lot of success on those US cable networks with shows like Biggascapes on Food Network and that ran for three seasons, Rug of Justice on Animal Planet and other three seasons of that. And those were great and they were fun to make and we had a blast and they were doing well, audiences love them.
And then it just kind of things started changing. Right. And that's kind of when we pivoted into more IP ownership and international endeavors with our content. Right.
And what triggered that? What triggered that pivot? Because we're going to come and talk about that in a second. But your business from 15 years ago was kind of like a traditional production supplier to the American cable industry to talk about what triggered that pivot for you?
People weren't buying as much. And our shows weren't getting renewed. Executives were getting shuffled around. There's just multiple things that contributed to just...
It used to be that when we would talk to the US cable networks and we would talk about Canadian tax incentives. And they would say, don't worry about it right now. We don't need to include that as part of it. And then at some point, yeah, at some point, that switch to like, hey, tell us about those tax incentives you guys are talking about.
And that was really how we went from basically once we got on to Discovery Science with Secrets of the Ice, that was the conversation there. And that happened right at the time of... That was increasing and the buyers were decreasing and streaming was interrupting the whole thing. And COVID was mixed in the rain.
Yeah. So we're talking about peak TV. Essentially, when these American execs were going, don't worry about tax credit. So they say, can we make things cheaper?
I'm not bothered. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It makes things cheaper getting more episodes out of it if we tapped in them. But they just didn't want to go there at that point in time. Extraordinary. Okay.
But now, obviously, the world has tilted on exactly this in the content business. Exactly. And there's no one that understood it from those networks at that point in time. It didn't seem like there was anyone in our departments that really grasped the international tax credits and saw money that could be tapped from other places besides Canada as well.
Now, there's tons of people that are into it, obviously. And they really only care about exploiting the US market anyway. Yeah. That's right.
It was never an international conversation. No. No. Because international didn't really...
Just didn't figure on a lot of US networks. No, for sure. I mean, sure. It probably still doesn't.
So let's talk about this new world we find themselves in massively decreasing amount of commissioning within factual and unscripted as well. Budgets coming down for the content that is getting commissioned and acquired. What's the secret to surviving in this environment? Because you guys are thriving.
I think you've got three series in production this year, right? Yeah. I mean, it looks like 2025 is around six or seven series in production. But I think the secret to surviving is we kind of look at the money that's available, the budget that we have, and what can we make within that budget that's really good?
Not for a budget that's higher than that, and we try to hit something higher. We really work well within the constraints of what we have, and we try to milk it as much as we can. We have our people that work on our shows, work on all our shows. So we're not starting fresh with new people introducing them to the content time and time again.
People roll from one show to the next, and we're able to have a higher quality, more experienced subcontractors working on the show that can really help elevate the storytelling and the look and feel of it and all the production values come together. So we're constantly honing as well to keep it within those budget parameters, keep it within the schedules. But still, we're sticklers for quality and how things look still. We're still very hands-on with everything.
We just want it to look amazing, and we want people to really love our stuff and be entertained by it. And it's just constant tweaking with our core team, and then they really love it. And also, we don't have a big executive load. It's Tom and I, and our executive in charge of production, and our showrunners, and we keep it fairly flat or hierarchy.
We don't have 15 VPs at the contract. And that helps with having some money in the bank. Also, our intel collection is going to focus as moved from LA, New York, and cable companies down there, channels down there to more of an international level where we're talking more with the distributors. And the distributors are telling us what's trending and what's hot and what people are liking, what people are continuing to buy.
And we're just, Adrian and I sit down and figure out a show. Yeah. So would you say that you've got a particular house style? If you've got the same teams working across all your different productions and you're working lots of different genres, don't you?
Lots of engineering and science and etc. I mean, would you say you've got a house style and if so, what would you say that is? I mean, I'd say we do have a house style, I would say, but it does vary from show to show. So each show does feel unique.
But we've always been really focused on visual effects animation, even when we're doing animal planet shows, food network shows. That was always part of it because you always can elevate the production values. If you do that stuff well and it helps to tell the story, then it elevates it. So we use that in a bunch of different ways.
We do a lot of 3D CGI, but we're also now we have some 2D animation, a couple new shows that are coming, using 2D to tell a lot of the story. So it's still a similar workflow. Also to reduce the amount of dramatic recreations we find aren't as popular anymore in terms of what our buyers are asking for our new shows. And to kind of replace that and like Agrin was saying, just up the production value with beautiful visual effects and CGI to help tell and propel a story.
Yeah. And the trick is to, you know, traditionally when you're making animation, you write your script, you storyboard, you cut an animatic, you eventually get to your rough cut that way. We don't have the time to do it that way. So we have to figure out how to do it in a way where we can use visual effects as coverage and editors can pull visual effects and cut them in without specifying, I need this to happen from this frame to this frame based on this audio because to do that way, you have to invert a lot in the production and makes it a lot more expensive to do it that way.
If you need an improved script before you start animating something, it takes a while to get it that way. So we've really kind of figured out this way of being able to broadly specify what the animation needs will be in an episode and make that stuff before the editors are cutting. It's kind of like a video game engine. Yeah.
Yeah. And I'll like you create the environment in the world and you can move within it. Okay. And it suits a lot of the shows that we're currently doing.
So with your pivoting to being an internationally focused IP business, has that changed the stories that you're telling? And if so, how as a Canadian producer, how are you creating for presuming mainly English language markets? Is that fair to say? Yeah.
I mean, mainly English language, but a lot of our shows lately are over 50, 60 countries now. So they're getting a lot of them translated and they're finding an audience in non-English speaking areas, which is great. Yeah. Like we're always just trying to provide.
And if you're just on US Air, you can't necessarily, they're a lot more inward looking, right? So they want to hear USA Stories, whereas when we're developing for global audience, everyone wants a maximum variety of stories, which is great, because we want the maximum variety of stories. We want to tell as many stories as we can. So it does it opens it up in a good way, because there's obviously a lot of stuff happening around the world.
It's beneficial. But we do see so much more receptive in the international market than the domestic US. Totally. I mean, we went from making shows about Rednecks, you know, back in the day.
That's a lot of, I mean, we literally had a show called High Tech Rednecks that we did for Discovery Canada, which was a fun great show, but I mean, that was a trend back then. It was so much fun going around and selling stuff, and putting things up. And with these dudes that are making these million dollar vehicles for hunters on their 1000 acre ranches in South Texas, ridiculous. And it was kind of a comedy.
And we had, you know, we've gone from that sort of television to, you know, in real, I guess, character focused TV, to more of this documentary series that, you know, feature history and true crime and engineering and a lot of expert lead. And so it's changed that way. Talk is through your most popular franchise, you say, give us a rundown of your three or four most successful projects. Well, lately, I mean, we started what our pivot show, which really was Secrets in the Ice.
That's we are, are just in post on season four now. And I guess we'll be coming out all over the place at some point next year. So that was a big pivot. And that was, you know, that's was a show that kind of we created at the start of COVID when we couldn't travel anywhere and do any of that sort of stuff.
And we're like, okay, we need something. So we came up with this show where we would able to utilize, you know, studio sort of setups for interviews and a lot of CGI and visual effects and just great storytelling and research. And there's a practical, I mean, if you discover something that's melted out of the ice, you've taken it from there and taken it somewhere. So we realized on that show, when it started, there was a question of, okay, how are we going to fly all these places and see these, shoot these artifacts in situ?
But in reality, they weren't there anymore. The scientists have taken them anyway. So we started just organically, you know, getting a footage from scientists, getting the footage from the people researching the site. And that kind of then became a key part of the model was we don't need to travel to those places.
It's, it's, to acquire those images, doesn't require that amount of investment. It's easier to end more, it feels more authentic to get that footage shot by an non-professional scientist who's on a glacier in the middle of just once they found an object. Can we give us some examples of what sort of objects would be found? I mean, there's a lot of mummies.
Things like Mammoth, so we talk about it. Siberia is a great place for us. There are a lot of stories that have come out of Siberia. Mummies, mammoths.
Siberian times is our favorite publication. Yeah. What else? I mean, there's a lot of, you know, planes, world war two planes that have gone down, and you know, all that sort of stuff.
There's just tons of tons of stories. I mean, we do, I mean, these are usually 10 episodes seasons, hour longs. We pack four stories into each episode. So a season is 40 stories.
Okay. So tell us about some of your other shows. And well, you know, maybe give us two or three of the special shows from Chalk Deep. We all just, so leading from Secrets in the Ice, and then with Discovery Science Channel, we did Secrets in the Jungle, which was an excellent show, but coincided with the decline of Discovery Science, that kind of got lost in the shuffle for a little bit there.
But it's a great show. If we do Secrets in the Sand, we're just about to start season two of that. We did Secrets of Big Data. And then we're, so that's our Secrets universe, but we've moved beyond that now.
We're doing secrets in the dark, which we started production on secrets in the dark, which is another chapter to the franchise, which we're really excited about. Yeah. Those are things that are buried hidden or cursed. Yeah.
So it's got a little bit of a darker spookier tone. Yeah. Yeah. And then we did Mysterious Islands for, we did that with our partner, CineFlex, and that was picked up by National Geographic globally.
So that'll be on National Geographic. It's on the US cable right now. It'll be on Disney Plus. National Geographic everywhere by Canada, because we get those Canadian tax money.
Yeah, we made the deals there. But that's, yeah, that'll be rolling out early 2025. Yeah. And that's already there in the States.
So another fun show called Building Bad, about engineers that have made things for crime, user ingenuity for crime, as opposed to helping society. But you know, that's... Criminal Master Man. Yeah.
It's like celebrating a good idea. Okay. You know, if we're not judging the idea, sometimes, you know... So we're talking about now, call Six of Marines.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And that's just a perfect example.
Tumbling under a bank. There's a lot of very inventive bank robberies. There's a lot of inventive moonshine. Smuggling is you have to put your brain to work.
Yeah. And this is obviously the Breaking Bad sort of science, but not necessarily for... Well, more nefarious means. Yeah.
Exactly. And we're, like, again, this is, you know, just Intel we collect, and what people want, we're just like, okay, well, true crime is working, and so are these engineering sort of style of shows, and history, and kind of just matched it together, and created Building Bad. And we, you know, it's a Yeah, fingers crossed. Yeah.
It's a great, it's a great one. And then we're doing another series called a discovered by disaster. So that's about artifacts and places and things that were revealed in the wake of natural or man-made disasters. So there's a lot of these ideas come from, we're constantly filtering the universe of stories that come in, and all our researchers are doing that.
So we get these stories, sometimes it fits neatly in secrets in the eyes or in secrets in the jungle or building bad. Then we start to notice, oh, there's all these stories building up here that don't fit in one of those shows. So they tend to be, then we think, okay, well, we've got 40 stories. We've got a new friend.
Yeah, exactly. So how do we spin this? What's the organizing principle for the show? And that's kind of how it happens.
Yeah. We try to give them all their own feel and that was effective. Yeah, definitely. We never, we were, at this point in time, we're very proud to say that none of our stories have crossed into another show.
So we try to keep them very unique. We never want to work against ourselves. Yeah. So you're obviously working with international partners, which is, you mentioned Cinflic's earlier on, there's lots of, I know you're also working with Banaje, I think in some cases.
Yeah, we have a lot of workers. A lot of workers are big, yeah. Yeah. All the fans we've worked with in the past.
Yeah. And the Canadian tax credit, I mean, give us a sense of what difference the Canadian tax credit means for an international production, typically. Well, it's about 45%. Yeah, I mean, if you can max it out, we can, you know, 35 to 45%, and especially, I mean, we just make sure we use just to max it out, all Canadians, all Ontario residents, we shoot everything in the country.
We have a really good tax credit expert who really helped us capitalize on what we're available to get and how we get it and how we most efficiently get it. And that's been really helpful. They're an important member of the Senate. Yeah.
Yeah. That's a lot of lectures. Yeah. So, well, as I say, you've got lots of international partners, lots of broadcast around the world, obviously, finding your content affordable and engaging and obviously, you've got a very successful- We delivered quickly too.
Yeah, you did have a quickly as well because you've got that sort of almost factory mentality. Yeah. We've been turning these shows around from moment of their finance to delivery in 70 months. So being an IP business now, and not work for hire, you're retaining the rights to all of this content.
The industry is changing very much more to direct to consumer. In many cases, YouTube is now the most watched streaming platform. Surely, and we see factual content doing very, very well in building communities. Yeah, it's great to see that.
Surely, that's the next step for you guys to create your own channels around the brands that you've already created and have been successful and built up audiences. Tell us about that. Is that the next step for you? Yeah.
I mean, we started, I guess, the first foray into that is fast channels where those rights are being sought after now. And the money's not quite there. You're not going to fully finance a show that way yet. But as soon as you can, I think those things become even more viable.
And YouTube, similar thing, if we can figure out our model to exploit it in the same way we do with license fees, it would be an over-ainer. Yeah. I mean, it's obviously the future. And it's about the future.
It's now. I mean, I spend most of my day watching stuff on YouTube anyway. So seeing the same ads over and over again. But at least they're playing ads.
You know, somebody's making money. Yeah. So finally, how about the future then for sure? Obviously, that's going to be a key element of it when it comes to creating digital first content or exploiting your library that you already have.
What about new productions? What's in the pipeline? What's the Shark Teeth Factory back in Canada working on right now? We got a couple of shows.
Like I mentioned, we just started production on Secrets in the Dark. And we have another one called Vanished History that we started last month, which is a show about things in history that have disappeared, vanished. We're trying to give it a very sort of mystery sort of stuff into it. I think the Amber Room.
Yeah. Yeah. And so what happened to that thing? What does it look like?
Where is it? Yeah. People play some things. It's just all cover the gamut, multiple stories per episode.
You know, our formats, like I mentioned, tend to be four stories per episode per one hour episode, usually 10 in a season. And so we're excited about those two shows. And we're also what we have secrets in the sand second season going into production next month, which is great because that was a show that we weren't sure was going to get renewed and happened. So there were some pivots with that show and we managed to get a second season going, or we will next month.
So that's really exciting. We're developing some really cool stuff in the true crime space. Yeah, we're trying to just, we do really well in that history mystery genre and found some great buyers there and they like our shows a lot. But we need to, we never want to compete against ourselves.
And so we're always trying to push into genres that we're not necessarily in yet. So building bad was kind of the first push towards true crime stuff. We've developed a ton of true crime things, but we're trying to put them into our way of doing it. So we've got a couple of good ones coming that way.
So this isn't maybe it's a more co-viewing take on true crime or even male skewing. But that's, there's a lot of room there and obviously that true crime is the biggest genre. Yeah, well, I mean, coming out of MIPCOM, we spoke to a guy based on from Unpayer Analysis and he was true crime strong, etc. Yeah.
Also now, so. All right, okay, we're not missing the boat. You're moving into the rest of the thing. Yeah, it's hard.
It's so picked over. It's, I mean, we've pitched so many shows, so many of them are so depressing to develop. Yeah. But you have to find the spot.
Yeah, I guess. I guess. That's a lot of depraved things. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, that's, you know, that's my history sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.
Obviously, I've thought about that. We had, we had Harry, Harry from MindSone on the show a few weeks ago just talking about the mental health aspects of creating true crime content, like content, what's it like for the production team? What's it like for contributors in reality shows, but focusing on true crime, yeah, I mean, it's dealing with that sort of content on a regular basis. And you're evaluating murders, you know, you're looking upstairs.
Oh, that murder is boring. It's solved too quickly. You know, it's sad. It's even, you know, it's even just a thing murder.
You know, you're just talking about entertainment, but it was a, you know, this context. Yeah, totally. But, uh, it's the bothers me the most is like anything relating to kids. Yeah.
And kids getting murdered. And we, you know, it's just, yeah, I can see how that can, you know, we developed with lifetime that was kind of made me depressed from that. That was a depressing development process. Yes.
You guys have created so much such a successful franchise. You can do, you know, you know, you do the things that you wanted to. Yeah. Yeah.
Which is, you know, we're all, you know, you can never get too comfortable. Yeah. I mean, Adrian and I are always just freaking out. It's like, what's next?
The rutpole is always waiting. You know, there's, you know, as producers and business owners, we, if there's been a lot of ups and downs and we just want to make sure that things are consistent, not only for us, but for our team and our people that work on our shows and everyone's, you know, yeah, we like our people to be like us and before, we want the same people working on all the shows because there's no retraining. There's no, you know, people can excel in that format. So that makes it super efficient, right?
It does. Yeah. And everybody knows what they did at Ring. So much for joining us.
Thank you. It's great to meet you and good luck in London this week with all those pitch meetings. Thank you. I'm sure we'll be hearing more and more about new shows that come out on the back of that.
So all the best and thanks for being on top. Thanks for having us. Well, that's about it for another week's show. I hope you enjoyed it.
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