 You're watching Suncoast Spotlight, and I'm your host, Jeannie Corcoran, and I'm here in partnership with the Suncoast Technical College and their Digital Filmmaking Department, as well as the Educational Channel. And we have some amazing guests this morning, particular favorites of mine, Mark and Jeannie Simon. They are the co-founders and the creators of Sell Your TV Concept Now. They know all about pitching, selling, and much, much more, and you're gonna find out right now. So, welcome, Jeannie and Mark. How are you? Well, thanks for having us. Always good to see you. Oh, it's great for you to be here. We came all the way down from Orlando, rushed down here in the early morning, rush hour traffic, so you get an extra, you know, brownie points plus a little gold medal for making it on time. I'll take a brownie. Good, we'll take it. Yeah. Coffee donuts and brownies, right? I don't know, I never know quite where to start with you all because you have such an amazing background from Nickelodeon, from television, from pitching your own projects. Mark, you're an amazing artist. You have the leading storyboard company, really, in the Southern US. But I've also written the main book in the industry that's used, I think we're in six or seven languages now that trains studios all over the world on how to storyboard. Right, and for students out there, filmmaking, whether you're young or old, whatever your stage of development is in script writing or creating content for television or film or new media or web, storyboards matter and they really help you. They help you structure, prepare. Well, I can explain it beautifully. Everyone understands a comic book. So basically, a storyboard is a comic book version of a script before it's shot. It is the blueprint that is used to create and build the entire production. Just like if I told you, I want you to build me a three-story house, you're gonna have a ton of questions because it could be a thousand different ways. Well, if you read a script, everyone on the crew can see that script built in a number of different ways. The only way you can build a house is with a set of blueprints. The only way to create a production is with a set of storyboards. I agree, I agree. I don't know they're being taught that much to that extent and I think it's a shortcoming, especially when students don't have a lot of preprep and a lot of pre-preparation when they're in development. That was where the storyboard should start, isn't it? It should. I mean, a number of schools do because I know my books are, I've written a number of books. I know they're used in schools all over the world. I don't think it's used enough because storyboarding is not considered sexy. A lot of, because I, for instance, I even taught at UCF for a while and the students who came in all thought they were Spielberg and they just wanted to jump straight into directing. Oh, I don't need to learn anything else. Kind of forgetting the fact that Spielberg does his own rough storyboards before it goes off to the other story artists. So yeah, it's incredibly important. Not the sexiest thing. I think it is, but not everyone else does when they're just learning, but it's incredibly important. In fact, just even the process of doing the storyboarding between the story artists, the DP, the stunt guys, the effects guys, and the story artists working together forces the director and the rest of production to think about things they might not think about otherwise. So just the process of creating it, you find issues and problems and solve potential issues before you get into production. So the money you spend on storyboarding, you save much more than that in production. Absolutely. Time saving. And also the visualization of it all is really great. And I know, Jeannie, you do projects of a different kind. Besides the pitching and the concept development, so on we're going to talk about, you also do producing. You've recently produced an award-winning... And documentary, right? And writing. And writing, yes. We're just multi-talented people, I'm telling you. Well, you know, so my background is in production. So Mark and I, we actually met in LA working for HBO on a show called First in 10 with O.J. Simpson and Shannon Tweed. Back when O.J. was doing good graces. Exactly, that's right. Kind of a good graces. Kind of a good graces, yeah. So we met on that production and then we moved here shortly after that to open up the Nickelodeon studios. Have you ever been slimed? I forgot to ask you that previously. I have not, but I've eaten slime. I would eat gack all the time. It's actually pretty good. Yeah, it is. Is it like Jello? Well, it's made... No, it's... It's cream and the chunks were like applesauce. I think applesauce. So it's not bad. It's whipped with an applesauce. Whipped cream and applesauce with some green pink color. Exactly, right. So it's totally edible. So I worked for Nickelodeon, I worked on Clarisse Explains It All on Gullah Gullah Island, Allegra's Window. What would you do? Roundhouse, just a ton of shows, though. I was a producer. Big Bear in the Blue. Well, now that was created by Mitchell Kregman who created Clarisse Explains It All. So he went on, when he left Nick, he did that show. So you came to Orlando. You started Nickelodeon Studios. You got that rolling. How long did you stay with them before you branched out into your own endeavor? Oh, I was there at least six years. Yeah, you're there longer than I was. I was there longer. I left after about four years to work with Spielberg on Sequest when that came in. Oh, sure. One of our six-in-a-mix instructors for special effects prosthetics and horror makeup and so forth, Greg Baker did the special effects and prosthetics on Sequest. Yeah. You two can renew acquaintances, are you? Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, so that was fun. And that's actually where I got my start in directing. So I did second you to direction on that as well as doing all the concept art and all the storyboarding. And during that production is when I wrote the first edition of my storyboard book, the third one is out now. And it's also when we launched the storyboard company. So storyboard company is 20, 94? 96. No. Or maybe 94. No, that was 93, 94. No, that's right. Yeah. 13, 14 years, wow. And look at you, you're only 30 years old. Or is it 20? Yeah, it's over 20 years. My math. But thank you. My math is right up there with my personal calendar and time clock in my head today for whatever reason. And what is the website for your storybook? Storyboards-east.com since we're on the East Coast. Yeah, storyboards with an S-east.com. Okay, that's easy to recall. And sewyourtvconceptnow.com is easy to recall. And then you're also doing a do-it-yourself pitch tool. Yeah, our DIY TV pitch kit, which we're really thrilled about. We've had what we called original TV pitch school for a number of years, where it was a product of CDs and printed material. As Jeannie likes to remember how heavy it was. Well, it was, yeah, you know, seven pounds. So when we sold three, four, up to 10 at a time, that was quite a, that was quite a haul and a lot of shipping, yeah. The post office loved you, I'm sure. They did, yeah. Our assistant got really big arms. But then, so then we decided to update it and take everything to streaming video and downloadable PDFs. And Jeannie created some really great interactive files for basic templates on putting together your pitch package. You literally fill in the blank. We've laid everything out for you and what you need and how to put it together. Yeah, so it's a Word file that you can download onto your computer. Oh, well. And then use it how you want. You know, you fill in your content. I even put image here. I mean, it's very... It's a road map. It's foolproof, I'm telling you. And we've got videos taking you through not only what to do, but why. The reasoning behind it in samples of existing pitch packages on why they worked and interviews with network executives and successful TV producers and creators. I mean, like the head of Showtime, the executives from Saban Entertainment, the Emmy award-winning producer of Deadliest Catch. Wow. Yeah, I mean, just huge, huge people in the industry. And we cover literally every aspect. Of everything. Of everything. They're gonna make us go to a quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna learn more about that. And then I wanna hear success stories and how you go to trade shows and when people go with you and so many things that you do. I know we can't cram it all in one show, but we're gonna try, so stay with us. We'll be right back. Florida is on the verge of a new housing boon and the one thing all new buildings will have in common is heating and air conditioning. The HVAC program at Suncoast Technical College will train you in all phases of ventilation and air conditioning, installation and maintenance. For more information, log on to suncoast.edu or call 941-924-1365. Suncoast Technical College, career in a year. Welcome back, you're watching Suncoast Spotlight with our guest today, Mark and Jeannie Simon, the creators and co-founders and owners and creative minds behind sellyourtvconceptnow.com. And they do much more than that. And that's what we're talking about that as well as many other things today. How did sellyourtvconcept.com as a business get started? Were people just pulling information and asking for advice and wanting you to mentor them all the time? Well, we started this business 11 years ago. And what was happening was prior to that, we started creating our own content and pitching it. Like around 1997, we went to our first conference, NAPI in New Orleans. Sure, I remember when it was in New Orleans. It was so fun when it was in New Orleans. Then they moved it to Vegas and I lived there at the time and not so much fun when you live there and you go home. Of course, now it's in Miami. It's in our own backyard. But anyway, we digress. Yes. So we started pitching our own content back then, of course, making about every mistake possible, but we were still getting to pitch meetings and we were learning and we were having some success. We were starting to sell some of our content. We were seeing that blaming a lot of deals. A lot of deals. Right. And that took us years to figure out how to do that. Well, yeah, on the job training, that's for sure. Very expensive on the job training. Very expensive. You were working out all the kinks and working out all the bugs. So that you could teach others how to take a shot. Well, little did we know. That's what we were doing. So people kept coming to us and saying, well, how did you get that meeting or how did you put that pitch package together? How did you make that deal? To make copies of this force like that. And we were. We were like spending a lot of time doing this. And finally we looked at each other. We're like, I think there's a business here. We just need to figure out how to set it up. So that's really how it was born. And that was in 2006 that we started to sell your TV. And we've really set up a strong process on being able to guide people through every aspect. Because everyone has different needs. Some people start with a stronger idea, others weaker. So we always start with an evaluation where our whole team goes over their concept and then we know where they need to go from there. Some people like to start that way. Others prefer starting with the kit, the TV pitch kit. Which is great because it literally does guide you through every step of the process. But our team is set up where we have script writers, designers, artists, animators. Any aspect that someone needs along the way, we can fill in the blank to help them get ready to pitch to the network. From helping them write it to helping them edit it and everything in between. Absolutely. And we've done that in numerous times, yeah. Right. And I'm going a little off track here, but I think it's so interesting. You just worked on a Barbie movie. Yeah, it just came out three weeks ago. And it's called Barbie Video Game Hero. I was the senior story artist on that. And I was overseeing all the artists in four different cities. And I never even saw production in person. It was up in Vancouver. But in order to get the rate that I wanted, any travel ended up coming into my pocket. But nowadays it's so easy to work virtually. So I've got clients all over the world. I'm working on a series out of Eastern Europe right now. We just picked up a series in Ireland. I just finished working on it with a director in Ireland. We're doing another series in Canada that we just picked up with Disney. This morning we picked it up. And still made it all the way down to here, I don't know. Early morning emails before we get on the road. So yeah, so it was a nice way to start the day. It was great. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you. And you heard it here first on Suncoe Spotlights. Breaking news. That's awesome. And then you have also worked on a couple of other interesting ones lately. Chucky, installment seven, were you kidding when you said this? It is the seventh Chucky movie. It started as Child's Play, the horror movie, if any of you remember that, of the doll that kills people, little demonic doll. Creepy little doll. Creepy little doll. Yeah. And what's funny is Jeannie and I actually had dinner with the creator of the Chucky series years ago at another conference. And I do a lot of work with Universal Studios out of LA. And they called and said, hey, do you know Don who did Chucky? Yeah, I actually know him. Well, we need a story artist. So they put me on. So it was great. So we already had a relationship there. And then I did Woody Woodpecker right after that. Right. And now that's going to be a combination live action and animation, right? Yeah. It's really exciting. The first trailer is up online in Spanish because Woody is really popular in South America. How do you do in Spanish? How do you do that? It's exactly the same. Chucky trivia. Who did the original laugh of Woody Woodpecker? Who did the original laugh? I'm going to guess Bob from Walter Lance created the character. His wife did the laugh. Oh, that's fun. Oh, really? Yeah. It's just like us. They're working together. Yeah. And I bet you never got a residual doll of Bob. Probably not. Residuals, that's always a great consideration. Now when you do that sort of thing, when you help, for example, a client of yours or student of yours, get their pitch sold. You're paid as their instructors. You're paid as their consultants or their teachers. Do you ever have an interest in any of the projects? Do they really inspire you to where you say, I really want to be a part of this and I want to help you longer and I want to take a little piece of the back end or something? We never work that way. The reason being, well, there's a lot of reasons behind it. If we don't have full control, we don't want a piece of it because we have our own. And so we're going to spend all of our extra time on things we know 100% of. And we feel that everyone should get access to the information that we've got. And if we set up where we would take a piece of it, we would only be able to work with a select couple of people. And we want to be able to help everybody. So it's straight pay. Now there are times that we then get hired on, like Jeanne on the documentary. Well, yeah, on the documentary. So that was, she originally came to us as a consultant client. So I helped her develop the idea. And then she, this is the documentary we mentioned earlier about the Elephants in Motion. And this is about how the Thai government is conserving and protecting elephants. And my client is from Thailand. This is a very, she's passionate about this project. Project of the heart. Very much so. So she came from Thailand to Orlando and worked with us. She came and did several development sessions over the course of a week. And we came up with the structure of the documentary. Then we worked on the pitch package. She went, as a client of mine, she went with me to Real Screen Summit, which is a conference where you can pitch any kind of nonfiction show, held ever. I've seen you both at multiple trade shows. I've seen you at Real Screen Summit in Washington, DC. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. For Real Screen West and all over the world. Yeah, we got all of them there. Yeah, we went to the one in DC. So she ended up getting it picked up by a distributor in London, Espresso TV. So it's a one hour documentary fully edited, beautifully edited in shot. She did a great job. She's also director. So that is now being distributed across the world. And winning awards. And winning a ton of international awards, like best documentary, best woman filmmaker, best storytelling. And then that's, so she ended up hiring me as a consulting producer on the project. And I really helped her out in the post-production in the storytelling element. Putting all those pieces together. Exactly. I know myself from when I was in the business. You can end up with 40 hours of footage and you have to roll it down to 80 minutes or something. But you can't lose character and story. Everything is character and story. And that's what we really, really refined. That's a great thing. It's a great thing. Well, we're gonna have to take another break just for a second. And then we'll come back with our last segment. So stay with us because there's more to come on Suncoast Spotlight. Tectots Preschool is located on the campus of Suncoast Technical College and is open to the public for preschool and voluntary pre-K classes. Tectots has been serving the Sarasota community since 1977, offering a safe and nurturing environment for children three years of age and up. The students in Suncoast Technical College's early childhood education program work side by side with the professional licensed childcare providers learning the skills of quality childcare services and offering a low child to adult ratio. Tectots childcare services are offered at no charge to students of Suncoast Technical College and are available to the public at a reasonable rate on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, call Tectots at 941-924-1365. Extension 62383. Tectots, a great start for your TOT. Welcome back. You're watching Suncoast Spotlight and I'm your host, Jeannie Corcoran and my guests are Mark and Jeannie Simon. The talent's extraordinary in many, many fields including selling your concept, pitching your concept and much more. So let's get into the selling and the pitching and the pitching and the selling. Not only do you teach students, but do you still take them with you on trade shows? Is that something that you still offer as an option on occasion? We do, it's called our Pitch TV Buyer's Tour. Right, and in fact, we have one coming up in June. Oh, and? BAMF World Media Festival in Canada in the Rockies. It is the most beautiful place in the world. It's our favorite. To all of us sweating in Florida. Yeah, right. This might be a really good idea. Yeah, really. It's not a hardship to go. No, it's awesome. And what dates are those? That's June 11th to the 14th. And they would leave with you from Orlando and fly up. No, we meet them there. We meet them there. Oh, you meet them there. We do virtual training prior and we go over all their materials, make sure they're ready. And then once we get to the conference, then we help them out. Right, and we have people already who have signed on from Australia. I have a lady coming from New York and we'll have, I've got several more. Well, Banff is a very big deal. I mean, it's a very big deal. Well, what's great about it is you can pitch any kind of show. You know, so many of the conferences now are specialized. Meaning just nonfiction or just kids, which are great, but I like this one. Right. Because you can take anything. I've been going and scripted in New York. I don't know if you've tried that one yet. I've heard it's great. It's the same people. And I've gone for the last three years. It's amazing. But it's always scripted. And it's primarily television. I mean, there are some people that are made for TV movies and so on. But you end up, it's a small conference. It's getting bigger, of course. They all get bigger as they grow in reputation. But the first conference was maybe 200 people and then it was maybe three. And then maybe last year, 353.75. And you end up standing in line next to, you know, the Weinstein brothers or the conversation before or after a session with a New York producer from A&E or from, and the contacts are amazing because it's still very intimate, still very small. Well, Banff has that feel, but it's thousands of people. But it does have that feel. It's very easy to talk to people there. And because it's in Canada, everyone is so freaking nice. Yeah. And they all speak English so well. Oh, they do. Oh, yeah. And a lot of French. Well, what's nice too is it's set up, so as part of your registration fee, there are so many opportunities to pitch. There's speed pitching, breakfast with an executive, luncheon with an executive, cocktail with an executive, party with an executive. I mean, it goes on and on. So... And then our group gets extra stuff because we also set up private meetings with studio and network executives. Like one of our big ones this past year was we got a private meeting with Netflix, and which is the hardest group for people to get a meeting with. Oh, absolutely. But because of our connections, that was one of many that we had set up for just our group to sit down, and we spent over an hour with the Netflix executive. Right, when we started our TVME competition back some years ago, before the whole idea got ripped off by another festival in another state that I won't name by name. But when we had it the first year in particular, you coached our first winner, and he was extraordinary. Oh, right. He had put nine entries into the competition because everything was judged blind. We had no idea that, we ended up with these different winners and out of 12 possible winning positions, there's the grand prize winner, and then there's three, first, second, third in three categories, and there's two honorable mentions. So that's nine, 11, 12 possible wins. He won five. Wow. His script was... I remember that. His project was very good. Right, Austin McKinley was his name, and you all trained him, you gave him pitch training, and then I took him to Los Angeles, and we had phenomenal meetings. We met with the creator of Modern Family, and as well as the showrunner, we met with CBS and ABC. We met with the president of USA Networks and the head of Sci-Fi Channel and the partner of George Lopez for George Lopez Productions. And it just, the list went on and on and on. We had these amazing meetings, and because he had so many entries and so many categories that won something in addition to his grand prize winning entry, I made sure that he got a smattering of one-on-one interviews with someone about Sci-Fi, someone about comedy, someone about drama, someone about docudrama, that sort of documentary kind of drama, and it was an amazing thing. And he was well-prepared because he learned the rudimentary absolutes from the two of you, so it was great. Well, and he also had the older version of our TV pitch kit, too. Yeah, he did, that's right. So we gave him that and we did one-on-one with him. So it's great to have the reference materials and then have us to be able to go over it. So it's a really great one-two shot. And one of the things that we're hoping to do, we're gonna replace TVME at some point in the future. And what we're looking at now is omni-media because more and more when we meet with independent filmmakers or script writers or producers that want to grow in their skill from local or regional to national and global, we're talking more and more about omni-media. How do you pitch for the OTTs, the Ophidransoms, the Netflix and the Hooloos and the Amazons and the this, how do you frame that differently for limited-run series where they only want six episodes like 11, 22, 63, the... Believe it or not, there's not a whole lot of difference. That's what I'm hoping. There really isn't. But we've actually, even when we've gone to Amazon and to Netflix to pitch our own shows, there are subtle differences depending that you need to look at is like, how are they running things and how is it being viewed on that service? So Amazon and Netflix, people tend to binge watch. So they even for kids shows, you can do something that's serialized where it's one long story over multiple episodes where it's broadcast, especially for kids, you never do serialized. Because you don't know in syndication what orders are even gonna run them in. Think of Fred for example. And the studios don't want it that way. Oh, and Nickelodeon hates that. They don't want it dated. And they don't, if they're running... Well, they don't want to get lost. Well, Nickelodeon likes to run a single episode multiple times in the week. So if the episodes are, you have to watch them in order, that messes up everything. And it really screws up their programming. So there are some subtle differences in all of that we cover in-depth when we're getting people ready for the conferences. And I have to tell you, I've turned into a binge watcher and I've never thought I would. We do too. Because you have so little time in the working world. We're all so busy, and you know, even more so than me. But I'm running, running, running. I never even know what I'm gonna be home anymore. And I wanted to watch Justified on FX, which, oh my gosh, one of my all-time favorite shows. But I knew I was never gonna be able to watch it on a weekly basis, so I just waited. And then I binge watched six seasons of 13 episodes each, or maybe seven seasons of 13 episodes each. And my husband and I binge watched them over about a 10-day period. And I was- That's a staycation right there. Well, we did that with Breaking Bad. Oh, there you go. We didn't, because we didn't watch it until after the third or fourth season, I think. Right, coming up to the last half season, you know. And that show, you know, is dark, and we would watch three in a row. We were totally warped. We were like, we have to watch something funny before we go to bed. It's a good night and easy. Just watch, you know, How I Met Your Mother, or Big Bang Theory, or Fun and Silly. Well, we'll have to do more of this in the future because I know they're gonna tell us we're out of time almost immediately. But just to wrap it all up, where do you go next? What's your next big plan? Besides BAMF, we know about that. But do you have something new or big or different on your horizon? Are you just gonna do more of this excellent stuff you've already been doing? Well, we're continuing to upgrade our TV pitch kit. We have a lot of new videos that we're editing right now that are going to be added in because everyone who buys it gets free upgrades for life. So yeah, so that's a great thing. So check it out, TVpitchkit.com. Now does Austin, because you gave him one as a winner's prize, does he get to upgrade his? That was the print version. Oh, okay. It's just the digital version is free upgrades. Mailing is a hardship. I know. So we're working a lot on that and we're about to start on a new production of Dream Factory, so we're in pre-production on an animated show right now for ourselves. Well, keep us posted. And everybody out there that watches Suncoast Spotlight keep watching. We'll have Gene and Mark, Simon back and we will learn more and keep following their wonderful career. They just do great things. Let them help you. Thanks for watching.