“Hands up who loves commissioners!” said Spirit Studios’ founder and creative director Matt Campion as he began his ‘Outsmarting Commissioning Hell’ talk at the TellyCast Digital Content Forum this week. “I love commissioners! They’re just incredible people… but television is in a bit of a pickle. The system’s broken. We’re all doomed. We’re in hell!”
It was quite the opening. Campion talked about how just a few years ago there were plentiful commissions, with the main worry for producers being whether the commissioners would be on board with their creative vision.
2023 brought a bump back to earth. Spirit Studios saw a swathe of projects it was working on cancelled within a single 24-hour period, and Campion has heard similar stories from fellow indies. “Everybody is doom and gloom,” he said, while acknowledging that at a conference focused on digital-first content rather than linear-TV commissions “this room is different: it feels exciting… but in TV it’s a sinking time.”
For Spirit Studios, the lift is coming through scaling up digital content. Campion’s case study was a commission 18 months ago from Channel 4 to create a 10-part YouTube show called ‘Outsmarting’. It involved interviewing people who had escaped captors, from cults to kidnappers.
It performed well on YouTube, but Spirit Studios saw more potential in the format.
“What if we could film the content for the digital series but also bank the content to make a podcast? And could there be a long-form TV series? Could we make one piece of content and sell it in various different ways?” he said.
The first big challenge was that the company did not own the rights, so it had to negotiate with Channel 4 to get them back. After a few weeks of talks, a deal was agreed whereby Spirit Studios would go out and sell the project – with help from Quintus Studios on distribution for the long-form series – with Channel 4 taking a share of the back-end.
Fast forward to now, and the studio has created a podcast (‘Outsmarting Evil’) and a TV series with the same name which is currently in the edit. It should air in the UK in 2025, with Campion hopeful for global sales too.
That’s the rescue strategy he sees for indie studios. “Imagine if you could create that digital series yourself, create a podcast yourself, then use the digital revenues to fund your long-form editing,” he said. “And maybe get a distributor on board as well.”
