Zinc Roe commits to twice the episodes for year two of Zimmer Twins

In convergent media, it’s all too common to find broadcast properties chopped and reformatted to serve multi-platform purposes. But zinc Roe design’s Zimmer Twins flips the script by allowing kids to make short movies online, the best of which get broadcast on television. It’s a formula that’s clearly working – the show has just launched its website for its second season on Teletoon. "What the kids create in a way becomes the broadcast spot, which is kind of the unique part of it," says Anne-Sophie Brieger, Toronto-based producer of Zimmer Twins. "It’s very much what our company has always wanted to do, which is make sites where users can contribute content kids can make stuff." Since the launch of the show’s two sites – in English at www.zimmertwins.com and in French at www.jumeauxzimmer.com – in March 2005, more than 86,000 users or members have registered and more than 195,000 short one-minute episodes have been created. Both sites feature a ‘story mill’ that allows kids to pick from a variety of beginnings or ‘starters’, middle scenes, and endings to craft a movie using the show’s three characters: Edgar and Eva Zimmer, two psychic siblings, and their black cat 13. While the show was initially targeted at eight-to-12-year-olds, Brieger says the average age has trended to the upper end of that range. The show is also slightly skewed (55% to 45%) to a female audience. At a minute long each, the winning entries – Telepicks, as they’re known in the world of the Zimmer Twins – are used as interstitial programming between larger blocks on Teletoon. The top films are identified through audience rating and voting scores, which then bring them to the attention of the site’s moderators – and zinc Roe. "When they complete the story, we take their movie endings and we marry them to the beginning, and we produce those for broadcast," Brieger explains. That process entails audio touch-ups such as having voice actors read the characters’ lines – in French and English – and adding background audio to scenes where necessary, as well as synching the audio to the animation and outputting it in a broadcast-friendly version of Flash. Zinc Roe’s policy used to be that all authors of winning entries were emailed a consent form they had to pass along to their parents for completion, a practice that resulted in a few top-quality movies getting away. "We would email the address that we had saying, ‘Your kid has been chosen, please sign this release.’ And the onus was on the kid, and we didn’t always get the releases back, so we couldn’t necessarily use all the movies that we had wanted to." This year, the producer will be targeting parents instead of children, a move that will hopefully result in more permission forms for Telepicks being returned. Whereas the first season of the Zimmer Twins consisted of 60 episodes, zinc Roe has committed to delivering double that number for the second season. The first lot are scheduled to air in September, the next in November, and the final instalment should hit the airwaves in February. Brieger says she’s confident 120 good-quality pieces will be forthcoming. "We’ve really worked on the story beginnings to kind of generate even more possibilities and more endings," she says. To help reach that higher number, zinc Roe has put out nine new beginning segments to help get kids’ creativity flowing, 50% more than it created for the first season. Brieger says it’s already paying off: the starter segments and other content for the second season went online on Wednesday, June 28, and "over that weekend we had a ton more registered users a lot of kids who had come back and made movies, and some really good movies at that," she says. Given the success of the first season, Teletoon has helped immensely to raise the Zimmer Twins’ profile, hosting games based on the show and adding its characters to the broadcaster’s Camp Teletoon cross-Canada series of summer events. "Kids that are members of the Teletoon website automatically have access to the Zimmer Twins website," Brieger explains. "So, that’s given us a base before we even start of potential users." But aside from the renewal of its relationship with Teletoon – and doubling the amount of product it plans to deliver – the Zimmer Twins has received accolades from other quarters. The series took a silver award in the education/training category at the recent Horizon Interactive Awards in the US. The show has also been the recipient of production money from the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, both for the first season in the fund’s February 2004 round, and for season two in the October 2005 round. While much of the talk lately between interactive producers and broadcasters has been around the fair value of online rights versus broadcast rights for media properties, Brieger says the Zimmer Twins’ unique approach – creating online content then using it to build a user-generated broadcast property – has allowed zinc Roe to bypass that debate. "We own the characters, we own everything about it, and that’s been great," she says. "We haven’t had to worry about clearing rights. It’s been very easy in some respects – if we want to take these characters and put them on a T-shirt, or we want to create Zimmer Twin dolls, we can very easily." Having been approached by other producers to work on joint projects for submission to the Bell Fund, Brieger says she’s seen the rights headaches that can emerge. "Once you have to get the broadcaster involved, and a writer or whoever came up with these character ideas, it gets a bit more complicated," she says. However, those kinds of arrangements are more common than ones where rights for both broadcast and ancillary platforms are all held by one party, and Brieger is quick to add that not having all the rights in-house doesn’t preclude zinc Roe from pursuing those kinds of deals. "We’re certainly looking to develop new properties," she says, adding the firm has also been approached about creating a longer-form version of the Zimmer Twins for television, but has deferred for now. "We’re just still trying to figure out, and make this a great product," Brieger says. "But it’s always cool when something can online and have a pretty good life on television as well." Another advantageous and somewhat unique facet of the property is its lack of reliance on third-party sponsorship or advertising. "We were able to do it with funding from the Bell Fund, with a bit of equity from Teletoon, and producer investment," Brieger says. "We don’t have any kind of commercial branding, Kellogg’s isn’t sponsoring it, and that’s been great as well." Instead, additional future revenue streams will likely come from licensing the concept and format to broadcasters in other international markets. The temptation of paid content and pay-for-play business models might occasionally beckon, but Brieger says the series is not likely to ever go in that direction: "There are ways that we could do this with the Zimmer Twins, but some of it would probably destroy a bit of the integrity of the site and what the product is right now."

Zinc Roe commits to twice the episodes for year two of Zimmer Twins

Broadcast | July 11, 2006

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