It's the ultimate irony of children’s television that light-hearted and seemingly simple programs are inevitably the most time-consuming and laborious to produce.
The new animated Australian series, The Adventures of Bottle Top Bill is a case in point. Centering on the friendship between the title character and his best friend Corky, each episode finds the environmentally-friendly pair discovering new people and objects created entirely from household odds and ends.
Executive producer Noel Price explains: “For example, a car can be made out of a shoe and an airplane can be made out of all sorts of bits and pieces.”
“It’s aimed at kids aged three to six because that’s when they’re the most inquiring and can be stimulated by the stories and the process of making things.”
But showcasing the ingenuity of recycling to a captive audience has been a long and tiring process.
“Technologically, it’s a very advanced and quite sophisticated approach which has never been done by anyone in the world,” Price says with a weary laugh. “It is actually very complicated to get what is a simple and naïve style to the screen.”
The concept first came to Price about 20 years ago when he noticed how his now-grown children, like most easily distracted youngsters, seemed to quickly tire of new toys.
“They would play with them madly for about three weeks and then put them in the cupboard and that would be it,” Price explains. “And I thought wouldn’t it be great to find a new way of reinventing the toys they already have.”
Although the idea stayed with him, it wasn’t until several years later that Price began to seriously canvass the concept of creating a television show.
“I’d always had this idea of somehow in inspiring kids to engage in creative play with what they’ve got rather than going out and buying more. And I was looking at a show that could work all around the world.”
A few years ago, Price approached Cameron Chittock, who developed some characters and storylines which encapsulated Price’s vision. After the ABC and Britain’s Channel 5 expressed interest in the project, a second pilot was produced. Price says: “Then we had to work out how to actually make this kind of show. We had to invent a whole new series of techniques which required a lot of highly sophisticated technology.”
Price got financial assistance from the Economic Development Board in Singapore, where a studio was built and the painstaking animation process began.
Fortunately for the producers, the hard work seems to have paid off. In its first week on air, Bottle Top trumped both Sunrise and the Today show in the much hyped battle of the breakfast TV shows. Price says of his core demographic: They are a tough audience but also a very satisfying audience to communicate with. With pre-school kids you get a very quick instant response.
“It’s about getting them to look at the things around their house and learning to think about them differently and play with them in a new way.”
*The Adventures of Bottle Top Bill, weekdays, ABC, 8am.
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