Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

Little voices, big noise

Little voices, big noise

Combine skills learned on Video Diaries and on As Seen on TV, and you're just about ready to put 100 children through their paces behind the camera. Rob Buckley reports on Nickelodeon's KidNation

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All the films have a different feel to them, says Woodroff. “That's part of the beauty of it. It's a celebration of the diversity of kids and whereas there are always certain manacles on the makers of children's television, you have the chance for a child to make a film about some relatively unconventional things.”

With up to 300 hours of footage to work with, it's no surprise that the edit is still in progress, even with the first films due to air this month. Rowan believes that children will want to watch the shorts; in any case - given the films' brevity- he doesn't think they'll have time to think about changing channel, despite their notoriously short attention span.

Which is a clue about the likely budget. Nickelodeon is cagey about money, saying (of course) that it's more concerned with quality than cash. But the editing investment alone isn't small. Given the channel's known concerns with branding and keeping its viewers attention in a competitive market, its motivation is likely to go beyond simply producing quality programming.

But to Rowan and Woodroff, Kid Nation is simply a way for people to hear the authentic voice of children today. “I know that's the sort of thing you always hear whenever there's a 'world summit' on children's programming: programme-makers, strategists and planners all get together and someone says it.

”But it's actually quite rare that the child's voice is authentically heard on television,“ says Rowan. ”I think that's because people are too busy to listen most of the time.“

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