That Time we (Almost) Made an African Animated TV Show

Nearly a decade ago, Shof and I were approached by an African television production company to pitch an animated TV show for an African audience, because, you know, we’re Africans. It was incredibly exciting, and we threw ourselves into the idea.

Ambitions on both sides grew quickly, and before long we were asked if we’d be interested in setting up an entire animation studio (from scratch). The studio would handle the production of forty-four, twenty-two-minute animated episodes.

The idea was to produce a cost-effective show that could work as a Saturday morning cartoon. We used Avatar: The Last Airbender as a benchmark. Like I said, ambitious. 

The cast of Ekologue.

Our intent was to work with animation studios in the Philippines for the bulk of the production. Over the course of four years, they’d train promising young African artists in key areas while we handled the story and art direction. We projected that the total cost of production (including the cost of building the studio) would be somewhere in the region of $8 million dollars over four years. It was an intense period. Shof and I produced a massive 60-page business plan and budget, detailing every aspect of production - software, equipment, talent and studio personnel, as well as a pitch document for our first show - Ekologue.

At the end of the day, the television production company we were talking to decided not to move forward with the project. That’s just the way it works out sometimes. 

It’s been long enough now that nothing’s likely to come of Ekologue directly, so we figured it was a good time to share. That isn’t to say nothing useful came of the show. A couple of the characters (Bayo and Bahira) are now a core part of our ongoing webcomic, Under a Jovian Sun. In fact, in many ways, you can probably draw a direct line from Ekologue to UJS. You’ll see what I mean when you read the pitch below.

We also learned that while you may be excited about the prospect of a job, you really shouldn’t do spec work. We worked on this project in various forms for over a year and I’m not sure how close we were to actually getting greenlit.

In 2010 we couldn’t find a ton of helpful references when Googling “how to pitch an animated show” or “how to start an animation studio” so who knows how this would have turned out. A lot of our work was done in a vacuum, and I know for sure that if we were to pitch an animated show today, it wouldn’t be in the format we used then. However, we figured it might be fun for folks to look at and perhaps imagine what could have been.

If you’re interested, you can have a look at the pitch document here.