Raven Tales Interactive takes top prize at iPitch

A game developer and self-confessed novice to the art of pitching to broadcasters won the $10,000 iPitch prize at last month’s Banff World Television Festival for an online game based on First Nations mythology. Sand Box Games’ Michael Ockenden, who produces Raven Tales Interactive, says the money will "help keep the wheels turning until we can get our next round of funding." With the funding application and announcement dates for Canada’s major new media funding bodies fixed the way they are, the project is between rounds of funding right now, he adds. The iPitch session – now in its second year – is sponsored by the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, which also provided the $10,000 in production funding. Aside from short-term monetary considerations, there are added bonuses to the win, Ockenden says. "It’s also a really nice confidence booster credibility shot in the arm – it does obviously give us some exposure and a bit of media coverage," he says. "It doesn’t hurt to win an award from Bell either, because they do provide a big chunk of production funding." Raven Tales Interactive is the new media property for Raven Tales, a computer-animated series that draws heavily on Pacific Northwestern aboriginal – mostly Haida – imagery. Two episodes of the TV series have already been produced with some financing from broadcast partner Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), with a total of 13 slated to be available to the broadcaster by year’s end. Raven Tales Interactive is a partnership between Sand Box and Raven Tales Productions, the latter being the producer of the television show and holder of the intellectual property rights. While the technology that will be employed to create the game hasn’t been finalized yet – Ockenden says he’s weighing the pros and cons of such immersive 3D programming environments as Adobe Systems Inc.’s Shockwave and Virtools from Virtools SA of France – the mock-ups for the game depict Raven and his companion Eagle venturing across a 3D environment and solving problems drawn from Native oral tradition. "The idea of this whole thing is that you get an online, downloadable video game companion to the TV series," he says. "As far as I know this is the only Native-themed cartoon of its kind," Ockenden says. However, one of the recipients of the latest round of production funding from the Bell Fund is Anash and the Legacy of the Sun-Rock, another television property picked up by APTN. Created by Edmonton’s Sun-Rock Productions and featuring an interactive component by Reel Girls Media, also of Edmonton, Anash and the Legacy of the Sun-Rock is based on the legends of another Pacific Northwestern people, the Tlingit. One of the interesting facets of working with APTN is that content must often be produced not just in Canada’s two official languages, but in those of First Nations as well. In the case of Raven Tales Interactive, the broadcaster stipulated that a Cree version be made available, but Ockenden says that despite the language’s written version using a non-Latin alphabet, the request can be accommodated easily enough. "It’s basically a case of swapping out fonts and putting in a new dialogue file," he says. Adding phonetic spellings using the Latin alphabet or voiced-over narration by actors are other options available. In his own words, Ockenden is no pitch veteran, especially when it comes to winning over a jury filled with broadcasters. "This is the first time I’ve pitched to a television audience – I’m a game developer, that’s my background – so it was a little bit intimidating," he says. "I wasn’t 100% sure what they wanted to hear or needed to hear or what sorts of things really grabbed their attention." Due to tight scheduling at the Banff World Television Festival, the presentations were also rigidly held to their allotted six minutes. Nevertheless, Ockenden and Peter Strutt, manager of programming, western region at APTN, convinced the four-person jury to award the first-place prize to Raven Tales Interactive. The iPitch rules state that each hopeful has to have a broadcast partner at hand to help provide support, hence Strutt’s presence. While Ockenden says Strutt was very helpful in honing his presentation, he is realistic about how broadcasters view online content versus the television ‘main event’. "I wouldn’t expect a TV broadcaster to value your online component as highly," he says. "I see it as a companion to the show, an extension of the show, a way of improving the diversity of your audience and your market share and that kind of thing." That’s not to say Ockenden isn’t hopeful that Raven Tales Interactive will become a profitable property in its own right. "We’re trying to stay away from the website just becoming an expense," he says. "We’re looking to make a stand-alone, high-quality game that people are going to want to buy for its own sake, but the content in that comes from the TV show." However, he adds, even APTN has seen fit to fund only the television series to date, and not the ancillary properties. "Obviously we’re trying to get them more interested in the game side of it, if they see some value in the interactive component – which I hope they do," he says. Convergence is fine, Ockenden says, but marrying content for emerging interactive platforms to traditional broadcasting is a mixed blessing: while the popularity of a television show can certainly help drive Web traffic, for instance, it might also serve to convince decision-makers in broadcasting that new media will never be as lucrative as old media. "Like everybody else, my concern would be that it ends up being just a little companion website that doesn’t add value to anybody, and I’ve seen that happen a fair bit," he says. "People have been talking convergence for a very long time, so I prefer to keep the two separate: show, game, they’re both valid products in their own space."

Raven Tales Interactive takes top prize at iPitch

Broadcast | July 11, 2006

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