{"id":22314,"date":"2022-02-01T12:29:49","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T17:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/"},"modified":"2022-02-01T12:29:49","modified_gmt":"2022-02-01T17:29:49","slug":"joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Brumm Talks Bluey\u2019s Success"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Brumm, the creator of the global megahit preschool show Bluey<\/em>, took part in a keynote conversation with Kristin Brzoznowski at the TV Kids Festival today, discussing the genesis of the hit Australian series and why it resonates so broadly with kids and parents alike.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to make an Australian version of Peppa Pig<\/em>,\u201d Brumm said of how the show came about in his TV Kids Festival session, which you can watch in its entirety here<\/a><\/strong>. \u201cPeppa Pig<\/em> showed a fairly normal British family just going about their lives. The stories weren\u2019t superhero adventures or flights of fantasy. It was just families doing normal things. I wanted to put a little bit of Charlie and Lola<\/em> in there, too, really going into the kids\u2019 point of view of it. That was the genesis of it. And I missed working in series. I wanted to get a big studio environment around me again.\u201d<\/p>\n

The series draws heavily from Brumm\u2019s own life, he said. \u201cThe show is all from my life. It was based on all the weird games I play with my two daughters. Almost every game in the show was at one point played by my kids and me and my wife. A lot of the situations, a lot of the places they go to, are things we would do. When it came time to write the scripts, that\u2019s what came out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brzoznowski, the executive editor of TV Kids<\/em>, asked Brumm about his nuanced portrayal of family life in the series. \u201cI made Bandit [the father of Bluey] act and react similar to I would and Chilli [the mom] similar to how [my wife] would. Once you get enough episodes racked up you could start to get an idea of what Bandit was like as a parent. OK, that must be what I\u2019m like as a parent\u2014although somewhat less exaggerated. It was never a conscious [decision that] Bandit is going to be a modern dad who does this and that and the other. I just put him in the situation, and then those actions came out and you could assess what he was like afterward. That\u2019s probably the best way to do it. If I sat there and said, right, I\u2019m going to make him this sort of dad, it wouldn\u2019t have felt right, and it would have been putting the story and the comedy second. It was the cart leading the horse a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

On what makes the series a co-parenting dream for parents, Brumm noted, \u201cI had that in mind. I sat through a lot of kids\u2019 shows with my kids. You soon really appreciate the ones that are entertaining for you to watch. Around the house day-to-day playing with the kids, there\u2019s so much shared laughter in the games. It\u2019s not like you have separate senses of humor. Your sense of humor becomes dad humor because it starts molding around what makes your kids laugh. I thought, there\u2019s so much shared laughing going on, and surely there\u2019s a way to put that in the show, so it hits both generations. I don\u2019t write jokes; I just try to create funny, absurd situations, and then the humor just rolls out of that. The kids and the parents laugh at different things, but it\u2019s still the same situation. I try to find a humorous situation that is entertaining for slightly different reasons for the parents and the kids, but it\u2019s a shared thing. I try to avoid blatant adult jokes. There are a few in there, the ones the kids don\u2019t understand. Some do sneak in. It\u2019s nice to hear from parents who sit down and watch with their kids because that was what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brumm then discussed the qualities of emotional intelligence incorporated in the series\u2019 storytelling. \u201cIt\u2019s such an emotional experience, having kids. And being a 4- or 5-year-old, there are so many big emotions they deal with. The whole seven-year period is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster [as a parent]. So there are plenty of veins to tap into. Again, I just look at my life and my wife\u2019s and friends and family and find these common touchpoints. And I do a lot of reading. Other people\u2019s point of view. Psychologists. What\u2019s underneath those issues. I think I\u2019m good at picking what to include. What emotional thing does that kid have going on? And then it\u2019s a matter of not trying to clobber people over the head with it. I just try to take a character on an arc. Most of the stories are emotional arcs. I steer away from too much moralizing or teaching abstract things like spelling and all that. It\u2019s quite relatable because the little emotional lessons the kids learn are usually something you still use as an adult. When I can get a script right, it\u2019s the little kid learning the seed of that thing, but we\u2019re also seeing how the same emotional pattern still plays out 40 years later when you\u2019re the parent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brumm then took TV Kids Festival participants into the process of crafting a season of Bluey<\/em>. \u201cIt starts with me writing the episodes. Once we have those, we\u2019re all under one roof in the middle of Brisbane at Ludo Studio. There are 50 or 60 of us. It\u2019s not a co-production, so we feed it into our storyboard artists. We have a series director along for every step, and we\u2019ll brief the storyboard artists and create the animatic from there. I\u2019ve tried to borrow as much from the feature film, Pixar and Disney [model] and iterate those animatics as much as I can, get them right, re-record, cut and change around, so the animatic is ready to go. And then we have a bunch of great art directors who will mine photographs of Brisbane and Queensland and try to capture the feel of this city, which is a big part of the show. We use CelAction [a 2D animation software], which I learned in the U.K. It\u2019s what Peppa Pig<\/em> and Charlie and Lola<\/em> use. I brought that here; we\u2019re a CelAction studio. That pipeline begins\u2014design and background. And then into layout. And we have four teams of five people who animate an episode. Every four weeks, an episode comes out. We have a great VFX department that does old-school hand-drawn animation. And then it goes outside the building to sound, where my brother [Dan Brumm] puts the sound on. And then Joff Bush has a team of musicians, and we\u2019ll have a big music session and sit for hours going through each ep. The key to it is, myself and Rich [Jeffrey, series director] have our hands on everything, but we try to be a studio, especially with the animation, that gives the animators some freedom to act those lines out. The result is lots of lovely, quirky, cool bits of animation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brumm writes the bulk of Bluey<\/em>\u2019s 52 episodes per season, with just two or three per season co-written with others. \u201cWe tried a writers\u2019 room. It didn\u2019t work for the show, to be honest. The episodes didn\u2019t feel like Bluey<\/em> to me. I quite enjoy it. In a lot of ways, it limits the show to a certain extent; it limits how much we can do. But I\u2019ve worked 20 years to get to this point. I love writing, making short films, so I wasn\u2019t in a big hurry to give them away.\u201d<\/p>\n

On managing various extensions of a show, Brumm is of the opinion that animated shows aren\u2019t \u201cmeant to change mediums. It\u2019s fraught with peril but it\u2019s necessary because it\u2019s what pays for the show. It\u2019s been a real learning experience. I\u2019ve learned I don\u2019t want anything to do with it! There are too many voices in the room, too many competing interests. My strategy is to keep making the show really strong and people will still love the brand.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Brumm, the creator of the global megahit preschool show Bluey, took part in a keynote conversation with Kristin Brzoznowski at the TV Kids Festival today, discussing the genesis of the hit Australian series and why it resonates so broadly with kids and parents alike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":22315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[2847,6357,5723],"class_list":["post-22314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-top-stories","tag-bluey","tag-joe-brumm","tag-tv-kids-festival","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nJoe Brumm Talks Bluey\u2019s Success - TVKIDS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Joe Brumm Talks Bluey\u2019s Success - TVKIDS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Joe Brumm, the creator of the global megahit preschool show Bluey, took part in a keynote conversation with Kristin Brzoznowski at the TV Kids Festival today, discussing the genesis of the hit Australian series and why it resonates so broadly with kids and parents alike.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVKIDS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2022-02-01T17:29:49+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2017\/07\/2022-02-01-3-JOE-BRUMM.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"319\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/\",\"name\":\"Joe Brumm Talks Bluey\u2019s Success - TVKIDS\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2022-02-01T17:29:49+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-02-01T17:29:49+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/joe-brumm-talks-blueys-success\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Joe Brumm Talks Bluey\u2019s Success\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/\",\"name\":\"TVKIDS\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\",\"name\":\"Mansha Daswani\",\"description\":\"Mansha Daswani is the editor-in-chief and associate publisher of World Screen. 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