Angela Lee, Managing Director of MAKE Production says the market for factual content has become fiercely competitive since she entered the market a few years ago. Commissioners expect better visual quality as the bars have been raised to ensure contents look visually beautiful to create high production value. The factual audiences have grown more sophisticated and astute over the years, with pressure coming not just from television, but now feature documentary in cinema and web formats. The storytelling in Asian documentary in particular is now rivaling international broadcasters.

Viewers now seek higher entertainment value in their factual programming, often are now employing more techniques that you may only have found in scripted drama.

However, it is essential to remember that with factual programming comes very serious responsibility to reflect the stories fairly and accurately, managing expectations of contributors and representing all involved in the production process with careful thought and diligence. There are often legal, ethical and moral issues that must remain at the heart of our storytelling.

 

What are some of your big projects for 2016? Angela: Currently we are working on our second and third series Brilliant Ideas for the U.S. Bloomberg Channel. Brilliant Ideas looks at the most exciting and acclaimed artists at work in the world today. We have already produced 13 half hours and have another 26 half hours scheduled to be delivered over the next 18 months.

We are also producing a series for Channel NewsAsia in Singapore titled, Undercover Asia. As it says in the title, it is an investigative strand – broadcast across Asia, but distributed internationally – that goes undercover to expose the secret underbelly of Asia. This in-depth documentary series explores stories of crime, injustice, human rights, poverty and every aspect of the dark side of life in Asia today. This is our third year producing these fascinating films, and we have been incredibly fortunate to win many international awards for our investigations.

Everyone is hungry for more ‘out-of-the- box’ creativity when it comes to factual entertainment; the audience expects a fresh look on well-trodden space. Somehow, you will still need big characters to stand out. The audiences are always looking for characters.

 

What are your growth plans in the Asia-Pacific region?

Angela: I believe our strength, inherited from MAKE’s British journalistic roots, helped us to be uniquely equipped to produce factual documentaries to international standards. We continue to promote ourselves in the international markets as experienced filmmakers with a growing slate of internationally acclaimed productions, but our Asian expertise gives us something that very few Western production companies can boast. We are not a predominantly Western-based producer with a small office in Asia, we are genuinely Asian, bringing our experience and our blackbook of contacts to the West. This has been recently very successful with a huge Christmas production of Panda Babies for ITV in the UK. We co-produced this film with ITN Productions. This kind of co-production is essential for our growth. Budgets remain low in Asia, with demand for better production values putting increasing pressure on margins.

These commercial pressures are pushing documentary and factual players into more creative financial arrangements in the market place today, with new business models essential commercial world of advertising and marketing. As such, the likes of branded content is rapidly becoming a major form of production funding.

We will forge more ‘firsts’ in coproduction that we hope will be a precursor to yet more opportunities. We have a nimble work force that’s made up of multinational and multi-talented staff that are able to produce any kind of factual content. We also pride ourselves for producing programming promptly without sacrificing quality. When the Nepal earthquake struck, we were at the scene almost immediately and were able to produce a one hour documentary in record time. This show brought us a nomination for best direction at the Asian Television Awards 2015. And we produced the two-part series Ebola Diaries for Channel NewsAsia, following a Singaporean nurse to the Ebolastruck Sierra Leone. This series was also a nominee at the Asian Television Awards.

A growing specialsation in our company is our ability to go into areas that have experienced some disaster or terror and unpick the events six months later when a much more complex story evolves. It is very difficult today with rolling 24 hour news crews covering the minutae of every event to compete, but we are able to reveal so much more by waiting a few months and going back in. A good example of this is our hugely successful and multi-award winning film The Sinking of the Sewol, where we worked with families and survivors of the Sewol Ferry disaster in South Korea.

 

Share what MAKE is producing for the global market?

Angela: We are currently producing an extraordinary investigative show that looks into the murder of two British travellers on the Thai island of Koh Tao. This is a co-production for Channel 4 UK and Channel NewsAsia – a first for both channels.

As I have mentioned, we are producing our second and third series for the Bloomberg about the world’s greatest living artists. We are working with a British production company and have split the world in half, with MAKE producing all the programmes across Asia and Australasia.

A growing area of interest is video-on-demand. We are in discussions with a number of existing and emerging players in this market. This would allow us to potentially open a new area of commissioning for original content, but would also bring some of the world’s greatest factual and drama to Asia. Watch this space.