Clément Calvet

TV Kids Weekly. October 14, 2008

Deputy General Manager & Producer

Alphanim

The action-packed animated series Galactik Football has been a huge success for Alphanim. The show offers something for everyone. The football games are full of the suspense and stunning goals that has made the sport so popular around the world. It combines stop-motion and 2-D animation to portray realistic action and athletic prowess. In the show, players can tap into a mystic flux force to increase their power. And the fact that the teams also consist of girls and aliens opens up the storytelling to all sorts of relationships, which makes the series appealing to girls as well as boys.

This is precisely the kind of show that Clément Calvet, Alphanim’s deputy general manager and producer, wanted to see as a kid. “Personally I always wanted to produce a show based on football, but I could never find any concept that would fit,” he says. “We developed the show for a year and came up with something that pleased our partners, Jetix Europe and France Televisions.”

Calvet is very pleased with the unique look of the show. “We decided to do it in motion capture, so we asked for several talented people—footballers, acrobats, martial arts and dancers—to help us and to play in the teams,” he explains. “The result was what we expected, some spectacular and very believable action sequences.”

The show’s popularity has spun off a highly trafficked website, a Nintendo DS game and countless consumer products. “We have a lot of merchandising going on in different territories,” says Calvet. “Thanks to Jetix broadcasting the show, it’s very popular outside France, as well. So we’ve been able to do board games, card games, video games, as well as T-shirts, shorts, sports shoes, etc. We’re very happy, and we expect that the second series, which recently launched, will help make the show even more popular.”

Calvet and his team have 52 half-hour episodes of Galactik Football to offer buyers at MIPCOM, as well as several other shows: Matt’s Monsters, Gawayn and Hairy Scary.

Alphanim was founded by Christian Davin in 1997. At the time, Calvet was a lawyer and Alphanim was one of his clients. “I joined Alphanim to support Christian Davin,” says Calvet. Since then it has become one of the leading production-and-distribution companies in France. Earlier this year, it was acquired by Gaumont, the French feature-film company.