Copenhagen, Denmark: Demonstrating interview & mapping technique to Danish TV Industry at CPH TV Festival. Aug '15.

Was asked by Pernille Redder, Program Editor, Copenhagen TV Festival to present my approach to format development to the great and the good at this year's event. A packed house of around 300 watched on as a team from the state broadcaster DR put themselves forward to act as my guinea-pigs. Over the course of just 45 minutes, I asked them questions and got them to map the background to a format that they've been working on and off for past six months. The session went well considering that they had around 600 eyes on them. However there was slight resistance to the approach by one team member who felt that I was neglecting the actual format and that I was in danger of mishandling the delicate 'creative flame' that struggles to maintain itself at the early stages of development. His intervention gave me the opportunity to put forward my view that programme/format development needs to go backwards first to ensure that the underlying founding premise for the idea is consistent and shared across the group members. This is particularly important when there is an internationalist approach on behalf of the TV producers. In this case the programme wanted to investigate what would happen when you set up a 'shared economy' system on a Danish Island. Had we had time, we could then have go on to map out how the format would explore this founding premise. Twitter: #CPHTVDEVELOP The DR team consisted of: Lars Ostenfeld, Martin Sundstrøm, Thomas Skov Gaardsvig & Claus Skytte.