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NEWS KOCCA STAYS WITH TFP FOR FORMAT FORUM KOCCA (Korea Creative Content Agency) has renewed its contract with TFP (The Format People) to produce The Formatting Process From A â Z, a series of workshops to be staged in Seoul later this year. Led by TFPâs Michel Rodrigue and Justin Scroggie, the professional workshops are designed to support KOCCAâs creative format activities, with a focus on producing formats for a global audience. Sessions include Ideation And Development, Format Creation, Developing Formats With Directors, and Digital Basics Format Producers Need To Know. KOCCA has selected nine projects from Korean independent producers who entered its annual funding competition, and will fund the pilots; TFP then advises the shows through the development stages at the workshops. âKorea continues to be at the forefront of Asiaâs format development. We look forward to helping a select group of broadcast and production executives to enhance their skills and evolve in the format business. We are bringing the best experts in the format world to Seoul for extensive training sessions and in return, we are excited to learn about the unique perspective that Korean producers have to share with the industry,â Rodrigue said. âWe are pleased to welcome our television colleagues from other parts of the world to collaborate and raise the level of the formatsâ business overall,â said Sung-Gak Song, KOCCA president.
KBS focuses on The Producers in global collaboration quest
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OREAN broadcaster KBS is reaching out to the international market to make new connections and kick-start joint projects. Attending its 11th MIPTV, KBS is in Cannes with a host of content, including a major new series due to air in Korea next month. The show, The Producers, is a faux-reality drama depicting the behind-the-scenes life of the Korean TV industry. It features some of the countryâs best-known celebrities, including romantic actor Kim Soo-Hyun and singer-songwriter IU. The Producers has already caused a major stir in Korea and further afield in Asia ahead of its launch, and KBS has chosen MIPTV to unveil the show to the international market. KBS content business director Paul Jeong said the show had el-
KBSâ Paul Jeong
ements of humour, seriousness and romance. âItâs interesting because it has been produced by our entertainment department not the drama department,â he said. âWe want to meet Western producers
and distributors to talk about coproductionsâ. Jeong said that KBS was expanding its entertainment department, with new shows and formats suitable for Western markets due to be produced.
Three Meals A Day tops CJ E&M menu SEOUL-based CJ E&M is in Cannes with its weekend primetime reality show, Three Meals A Day, at the top of its sales roster. The hour-long show takes its two urban-living celebrity hosts to the countryside, where they try to live a slow, simple, self-sufficient life, using what materials they can find to make themselves
comfortable and, most importantly, to prepare three organic and creative meals each day. To add to the task, other celebrity guests arrive and the hosts have to prepare a meal requested by the guests. For instance, if they ask for meat, the hosts have to bargain for it from the production crew by trading hard labour in a
Jin Woo Hwang (left), head of formats; Myung Han Rhee, executive director; and Lang Lee, content analyst, of CJ E&M
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sugar cane field. The programme was created by Na Young-Suk, whose previous format show, Grandpas Over Flowers â in which four older actors backpack around Europe with a younger guide â has been successfully sold to several territories, including China, France, Denmark and Sweden, with NBC producing a version in the US. CJ E&M executive director Myung Han Rhee said Three Meals A Day was available for sale both as a completed series, and as a format suitable for many territories where urban dwellers yearn for the simplicity of rural life. âAfter watching it, the audience has the feeling that they must go out and enjoy the countryside themselves.â The second season, now completing, has the same format in a remote fishing village, where harvesting mussels replaces cutting sugar cane.