Tag Archive for: TVNZ

Reid’s Director’s Attachment on ‘After the Party’

After the Party is out now on TVNZ+, with new episodes releasing each week. DEGANZ member and Incubator alum, Stella Reid, worked on the show through a Director’s Attachment.

Stella joined director Peter Salmon through pre-production, shooting, and parts of post-production as an active observer. She shared,

I saw this opportunity as an investment in my career. I aim to shoot long form content, so it was invaluable to witness Peter’s methodology — well paced and technically proficient. He could balance an economy of coverage by envisioning the edit while shooting.

As production got busier, Stella was entrusted to direct and shoot supplementary content with a splinter unit. She told DEGANZ how grateful she was that the attachment also allowed for hands-on experiences and the opportunity to work with that team.

In addition to the professional development side of the attachment, Stella was also drawn to the show itself. Set in Wellington, the gritty drama series follows Penny, played by Robyn Malcolm, after she accuses her husband of assaulting her teen daughter’s friend at a party. Years later after the accusation, people still don’t believe her and she struggles to keep her life together. She said,

Many aspects of the story pulled me in. I’m writing a feature with two older female characters, and I’m also a lifelong Wellingtonian. I find such beauty in the south coast, and am pleased to see it be a character in the show.

Congratulations to Stella for completing the attachment! It’s always great to hear what members get out of DEGANZ’s talent programmes.

This DEGANZ Director’s Attachments was funded by New Zealand on Air and the New Zealand Film Commission.

/by

What’s the buzz, tell me what’s a-happening?

View from the Top banner

NZ On Air’s Where Are the Audiences Survey 2023 confirmed what previous reports have been warning of—the death of linear television in New Zealand. (WATA research here.)

Three telling points were highlighted in the document that attest to this:

• All traditional media continue to show consistently declining audiences, with TV no longer attracting the biggest audiences during its traditional peak time of 6-10.30pm.
• For the first time the study is showing significant declines in traditional media use among 60+ year olds, and 40-59 year olds are now at the cross-over point where digital media audiences overtake traditional media.
• 2023 also represents the cross-over point when New Zealanders overall start to spend more time using digital media than traditional media.

I’m in one of those older demographics, and I can tell you that I spend more time watching YouTube than I do watching broadcast TV.

If you look at the most popular channels, sites and stations graph, you can see that I’m one of the people who has in 2023 made YouTube the biggest attractor of New Zealand audiences each day at 44%, with Netflix sitting just behind at 42%. TVNZ 1 has gone from 48% in 2014 to 34%, while TVNZ 2 doesn’t even do well enough to get on the graph, at 11%–a death rattle if ever I’ve heard one. TV3 is the bottom player on the graph, going from 34% in 2014 to 17% this year. The rising TikTok sits two percentage points above at 19%. No wonder NZ On Air is throwing money at TikTok in pursuit of the elusive yoof audience.

New Zealand’s bastion of commercial TV media, our public broadcaster TVNZ, after a post -COVID advertising recovery under the canny watch of former CEO Kevin Kenrick, is in throes of its own. With a projected loss of $15.6 million in the 2023/2024 year due to slumping advertising revenue, the belts there are being severely tightened. Head of Drama and Scripted Comedy Steve Barr got the push under a restructure, and now Chief Transformation Officer Kate Calver (Slater) has left to take up the CEO role at Great Southern TV. A positive for TVNZ is that TVNZ+ on the NZ on Air graph has seen its audience reach grow from 14% in 2016 to 32% in 2023, sitting just under TVNZ 1. I think some acknowledgement for this needs to go to former TVNZ CEO Rick Ellis and his digital strategist Simon Aimer, who drove TVNZ into the digital era with their “Inspiring on Every Screen” strategy. With an interim CEO still in place after the departure of Simon Powell following the collapse of the RNZ – TVNZ merger, and a new chair in current NZFC Chair Alastair Carruthers, there’s undoubtedly more transformation to come in that balliwick.

Back at the NZFC ranch, Dana Youngman has been appointed Change Manager by new NZFC CEO Annie Murray, to bring about transformation that the filmish screen industry has been baying for, for years. Change there is also driven by the recent budget cuts NZFC has suffered or will face in the near future. We shall find out what comes in this space in the not-to-distant future, but for the time being we’ll just have to wait… like we’ve been doing since Annabelle Sheehan departed in 2021.

Competition has seen Netflix and some other streamers on the advertising-driven bandwagon for some time now. Netflix has just introduced title sponsorships and binge ads to its advertising offerings. At the same time, its subscription prices for their ad-carrying service and their ad-free service have gone up in the US and will soon in the UK, France, and undoubtedly elsewhere. It’s ironic when you think about it: you used to get advertising for nothing on Free to Air TV. Now you have to pay for it on advertising-carrying subscriber services.

Consolidation is coming in the streamer world is the catch cry we hear more and more these days. We are also being told that peak TV is over, with streamer budgets and commissioning shrinking. Not only has NZ completely missed the Golden Age of Television Drama globally, but it’s become increasingly harder for us to play catch up with the same old or decreasing domestic budgets–we shall see if the New Zealand Screen Production Rebate changes this.

Exacerbating the uncertainty for the NZ screen industry is the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike. I’ve heard international productions are backed up, wanting to get into NZ to shoot. Yes, the writers are writing but nothing can be done without actors. The actors’ down-tools has gone past the 100-day mark with no real end in sight. Both the guilds and the studios while still talking do seem to be at considerable loggerheads.

I guess the only thing to do at this point is to smile and sing a little tune:

Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to
Problems that upset you, oh
Don’t you know
Everything’s alright, yes, everything’s fine…

Tui Ruwhiu
Executive Director

/by

‘Down for Love’ has Found it’s Match with Netflix

While we wait for season 2 of Down for Love, season 1 of the wholesome reality series, produced by DEGANZ board president Robyn Paterson, caught the eye of Netflix and is now internationally available on the streaming service!

As described in the show’s logline, the “heartwarming quest for love […] follows several people with Down Syndrome as they navigate the trials and triumphs of dating.” The show takes you along on a series of dates between the singletons as they search for their right match.

While adhering to the match-making reality TV genre, the series is uniquely personal to the participants due to the production’s dedication to thorough research of what each person was looking for in a partner, what sort of date activities they’d enjoy, and their plans for the future. In an interview with The Spinoff in 2022, Robyn shared that the show’s match-making strategy was based on pairing people with similar lifestyles and interests, not what would create the most drama. She commented,

[A]t the very least, if there wasn’t a romantic connection they would get a really solid friendship.

In the same interview, Robyn shared how the entire production had an extended duty of care, from comfortable scheduling for the participants to having disability-specific counsellors available. She also explained that allowing the participants control over their own stories was crucial. She said,

We really wanted people to stay in the driver’s seat of their own stories. Especially with intellectual disabilities, because people aren’t often afforded the right to tell their own stories.

Audiences were perceptive to the production’s care for the participants, causing the show to amass a strong following of viewers from its debut season.

Congrats to Robyn and the team! It’s great to see a Kiwi show earn its spot on such a popular international streaming service.

Kiwi audiences can watch season 1 of Down for Love on TVNZ+, while the rest of the world can catch it on Netflix.

/by

From the Fire Nation to the Wellness Cult: A Sneak Peek at Liang’s Upcoming Projects

Sneak a peek into DEGANZ member Roseanne Liang‘s upcoming projects.

The Season 2 trailer of TVNZ’s dystopian dramedy Creamerie is available online now. Set eight years after a deadly virus seemingly brings on the extinction of the entire male population, the show follows three dairy farmers when they stumble across a male survivor, Bobby. Immediately following the first season’s cliffhanger, this season will follow trio Alex, Jamie, and Pip, accompanied by Bobby, on their journey to take the Wellness cult leader down and reveal the truth about the ‘mandemic’.

The first season, which premiered in 2021, quickly became a beloved and critically-acclaimed series and was picked up by the streaming service Hulu. Season 2 will come out on TVNZ+ on 14 July before releasing on Hulu and SBS Viceland on 28 August. Roseanne created the show along with JJ Fong (Jamie), Perlina Lau (Pip), and Ally Xue (Alex) and is the show’s sole director.

Meanwhile, Netflix released the first teaser trailer and first look stills of the highly anticipated live-action adaption of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. The teaser features familiar imagery from the original cartoon, with the four nations’ emblems carved from their respective terrains and elements. It also confirms for the first time that the series will debut in 2024. The character sneak peeks reveal the real-life reimaginings of the iconic characters Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko.

Roseanne directed episodes five and six and was a co-executive producer on the series pilot.

Keep your eyes peeled for Roseanne’s work as it hits your TV and laptop screens!

/by

‘Still Here’ at the 2023 Voyager Media Awards

The Voyager Media Awards has announced the 2023 winners with Still Here taking home the Best Video Documentary Series title. Congratulations to DEGANZ members Josh Yong and Frangipani Foulks who are credited as editor and assistant editor respectively. Josh was also the series’ associate producer.

Still Here tells stories of Pasifika communities residing in Auckland’s Ponsonby, Herne Bay, and Grey Lynn suburbs. The four-episode documentary series captures the families’ lifestyles that keep their traditions alive. By remaining in their family houses, they fight rampant gentrification daily. In each episode, the intergenerational community stories debunk the myth that ‘all the islanders have left.’ They are still here and visible.

As the judges of the awards said,

These intimate portraits (of the locals) are a rich intersection of the past and present that conveys with nuance what it means to be Pacifica in New Zealand.

The Voyager Media Awards acknowledges the best of New Zealand’s journalism. The awards, formally known as the Qantas Press Awards and the Canon Media Awards, aim to celebrate the work of journalists, reporters, feature writers, columnists, cartoonists, reviewers, photographers and video journalists.

All four episodes are out now on TVNZ+.

/by