Podcast – Pikelet Pictures’ Jessica Smith and Scarlett Koehne on their new online series Videoland
Videoland director Jessica Smith and producer Scarlett Koehne reflect on queer representation and 90s nostalgia in the Series Mania Comedy Competition-winning series.
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Jessica Smith and Scarlett Koehne of Pikelet Pictures, Emmanuelle Mattana in Videoland
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When Pikelet Pictures creative team Jessica Smith and Scarlett Koehne were developing a release strategy for short series Videoland, there were two criteria: an international world premiere and releasing on an accessible platform for maximum reach.
Hosting their world premiere at the prestigious television conference Festival Series Mania was not a bad start. As the largest global series-focused festival and forum, Series Mania has a strong reputation for launching premium and award-winning television such as Succession, Hacks, and Australia’s own Fisk.
“It's so tactical entering into festivals and doing the festival circuit and [Smith] had done so much research,” Koehne says. “Be really selective when entering into a film festival because if you want that global premiere, you want to save it up for someone who’s going to give you that street cred.”
Smith agrees, saying that the calibre of screenings and talent attending, coupled with the industry forum and marketplace that runs simultaneously, “if we could get ourselves into Series Mania with a show, we could capitalise on being there for the forum as well."
And their strategic and selective approach to submissions paid off. Videoland was invited to have their World Premiere at the 2024 festival, held this March in Lille, France, and was ultimately selected for the coveted Comedy Competition. Only a handful of Australian titles had been selected for the category and only one series had won before, with Fisk taking the honours in 2021. Videoland would be the second.
"As a short form series, we weren't sure what our chances were of getting into some of these really top tier festivals,” Koehne says. “And when we found out we got in, it was competing in a high level at the comedy competition category, […] we thought it was a mistake.”
Smith continues, “We were then thinking, are we going to be up against long form shows, true comedies, whereas Videoland to us feels a bit more like a dramedy. And when there are jokes, which there are, how are they going to sit with a French audience? We were a little bit worried that if we were being judged on the quality of our comedy as opposed to the quality of our show, that might not work in our favour, but we were wrong!"
On the latest episode of the Screen Australia podcast, we spoke with Smith and Koehne following their win at Series Mania about their festival strategy and experience premiering in a foreign market. They also reflect on the creation of the queer dramedy and challenges of retro-fitting (literally) a video rental store.
In Videoland, when 17-year-old video store clerk - and recently out - Hayley (played by Emmanuelle Mattana) meets the girl of her dreams at work, she turns to the movies for a crash course in queer relationships with the support of her overly supportive best friend Tanya, colleague Daniel, and beleaguered boss Mel. But this is 1998, and nuanced queer representation is hard to find.
Exploring identity, queer representation, and filled with 90s nostalgia, Smith claims the series is only partly autobiographical, but was inspired by her own experiences working in a video store and searching for queer role models.
“If you could find those lesbian characters or those queer characters, more often than not, they were evil or vampires. They were the bad guy. They were the monster. So, I think it was really important for me to tell that story at that time, to really help an audience that hasn't been through this experience. Because what […] I thought was my lovely, unique little story, about working in a video store and trying to find representation, but every queer person I talk to who came of age in the 90s says that they did exactly the same thing, which is wonderful. Getting this story across to people who didn't have to go through that, who could see themselves on TV and couldn't see us on TV or on film, I think it really helps them understand how important representation is and always has been.”
And the team are excited to achieve the second point of their release objectives, with the series premiering on Netflix this September. Smith had this to say when we spoke to the team at release:
“To debut as a creator with a series on Netflix is incredibly surreal, that’s just not something I ever thought would happen. But the real win is having our show about queer representation on such an accessible platform with such a huge viewership. It was always so important for us to reach a big, broad audience, so Netflix coming on board has put us in a position to achieve that in a way we never imagined.”
Watch Videoland now on Netflix.
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