Psychic Bunny Launches Mobile, Web Video Production Company

In Los Angeles today, production studio Psychic Bunny announced the launch of its original content subsidiary Lead Balloon, for production of feature films, web series, games, mobile and interactive projects. Psychic Bunny produces motion graphics, animation, production services, and interactive design for commercial, feature film and games. Their credits include contributions to the theatrical gaming experiences The Real

Lead Balloon's Coma, Period

Deal and CineBingo, as well as the U.S. Army-commissioned “BiLAT”, a bilateral negotiation game title currently being used in military training. Lead Balloon is wrapping the web series Coma, Period with a distribution deal soon to be announced and an independent feature, The Echo Game.

MobilizedTV spoke with Jesse Vigil, vice president of creative affairs, and Rick Castaneda, creative director, about how they intend to target production for the mobile phone, and what it is about the mobile platform that gets their creative juices flowing.

How did a couple of guys working in animation and motion graphics decide to get into original production? And why did you pursue the web and mobile platforms?

Jesse: We do motion graphics, post production, design, interactive, and it’s unusual under one roof it would be so multi-disciplinary.Production has always been our first love. Psychic Bunny is a work-for-hire company that finances the original content division where our hearts truly lie at the end of the day.

I see a lot of potential and opportunity in the web and mobile. We’re definitely the Young Turks in the space. There is a certain amount of frontier here to make a name for yourself, to prove yourself.

Rick: We can’t ramp up the next NBC on our own. But, in the mobile space, we can do it all from top to bottom– and own it to boot. One of the nice things about working in this space is that intellectual property-wise, you have complete creative control. To produce beyond the benchmark quality of the space, we can do it all for a fraction of the cost of what it takes to mount a network pilot

Will there be a mobile component to Coma, Period and/or The Echo Game?

Rick: Coma, Period is developed to work well on mobile. There are 10 episodes, each one a short length, around 2 to 3 minutes–perfect for on-the-go. Each episode is self-contained but there’s also an arc to the whole first season. So you can watch one episode or there’s a benefit to watching all ten. When we were developing the show, there was a completely different mindset in developing something for mobile than for network release. The industry and the mobile space in general is very conflicted now. It’s not possible to watch an entire 48-minute TV episode while you’re standing in line at the bank. But that’s what people are used to creating. We believe strongly the format has changed, so the content has to be structurally different. For this show, there is no episode longer than 3 minutes, so you can watch it in its entirety while you’re waiting in the bank. It’s not a Tivo or die (if you miss an episode, you’re screwed). This isn’t a show that we thought would be perfect for network TV but we can’t afford it so we’re releasing it on mobile. We did it to be created for bite-sized chunks.

Do you have a mobile deal for Coma, Period?

Jesse: We’re currently looking at this. The distribution deal we’re about to announce is for a web television network. That just happened first. It works well as a web TV series, so that’s the focus now. That’s partially because finally everyone is starting to know how to distribute content on the Internet and there isn’t that same strong unifying force in mobile. The option is still on the table in that regard. Now that we’ve locked down the first deal, then one of the areas we’ll start looking at in the near future is how to move into totally mobile.

What kinds of productions are you thinking of for mobile?What do you see as the aesthetic and storytelling demands of the mobile medium?

We have several things on the slate up and coming. We’re looking for production partners or sponsorship partners in order to start moving forward. One of them is an animated series, Air Pirates. One of them began life intended as a mobile series; it’s an 8-minute campfire ghost story. That may be the gateway to an on-going series of ghost stories or maybe the first of ten totally self-contained ghost stories. We’re actually looking for producers for the first short.

What are the storytelling and aesthetic demands of producing for mobile?

Jesse: You can go for a knock-out punch. That’s what I like: you can go in, make your story and nget out. You don’t have to get everything set up for half an hour until what you want to happen happens.

Rick: The short length is an issue and one of the other projects we’re looking at, be it for mobile or the web, is Caldera, which is the pet project of Doug Spice, one of the leads at Lead Balloon.

Jesse: Aesthetically, Caldera is like a show like The Wire. As it is now, it does for private military contractors what The Wire did for narcotics and cop show aesthetics. It’s a very deliberate show that takes its time to introduce plot points and get you to know the characters, and yet it’s a short form subject matter. What you have to do is revisit everything that conventional wisdom says about storytelling for TV and film with regard to pacing and structure. In other words, retain that deliberate aesthetic and redistribute the key pacing and the plot points so you’re still delivering something complete and satisfying [in a shorter episodic structure].

Will you try to structure deals before you produce, or produce content on spec?

We produced Coma, Period pretty much on spec. We wanted to put our money where our mouth was. To say, here’s a show we did where not a single frame hasn’t been touched by VFX and we did it for a lower budget. It’s possible to put this out. We didn’t want to be talkers, we wanted to be doers. That said, the model that makes the most sense is to go in with some partnership or some deal in place, going forward.

Are you aiming the mobile productions at any particular platforms/handsets?

We’re very open with this. The device is going to change, but what we sort of believe in is the structure in the content behind it. In the end there are lots of problems with compatibility of handsets and excclusivity with networks for those devices. We’re really most interested now in challenging a lot of the conventions about storytelling in that space.

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