Colombia. Between October 10 and 13, Barranquilla, Cali, Medellín and Bogotá, were epicenters of the Content Forums of the National Television Authority, events that sought to socialize various tools to face the challenges of internationalization, production and promotion of quality content in the audiovisual field.
Ángela María Mora Soto, director of the National Television Authority, closed the series of conferences at the Sergio Arboleda University, where she highlighted the importance of this type of events for the training of different stakeholders in the sector. "In these spaces we promote the industry and we want a large number of people who have to do with the world of content to be linked and can, in addition to sharing their experiences and taking successful knowledge for the construction of new projects that can impact television."
Likewise, he explained that this cycle of conferences is the prelude to the content fair scheduled for November 17 and 18 in Bogotá that the ANTV will hold and invited the attendees of the forum to register in order to make visible and open the possibilities of sale of their projects.
Francesc Escribano Royo, associate professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, writer and journalist, was in charge of explaining the editorial and design characteristics of the production of national and international quality content. He also gave special relevance to the ability of humans to fictionalize reality through storytelling. According to him, "all the stories repeat the same stories, the stories have not changed" and in this way, very much in spite of the creatives, what the channels are looking for today are audiences, ratings, results, but not novel stories. Even so, for the past 15 years television has striven to innovate by incorporating film techniques and formats into television and including multicultural content. He showed in his talks how reality shows and animated series are perfect examples of content that reflects reality without pretending to explain it.
For its part, the talk led by the filmmaker of the National University of Colombia, Marcela Benavides, revolved around the internationalization and distribution of content, focusing, especially, on providing tools to the audience interested in the search for platforms and windows that support proposals for national content. Benavides, directed his presentation towards the new ways of financing a project. He also spoke of the search for sponsoring allies and mentioned the possibilities of financing and dissemination that entities such as ANTV or MinTic, among others, are promoting by opening audiovisual calls for emerging and independent producers.
His recommendation for young producers was to open themselves to the possibility of generating associations and to strive to carry out their ideas, even if the conditions are adverse. According to him, it is possible to carry out all kinds of projects taking advantage of the technological situation that drastically reduced production costs, exploring the transmedia possibilities that facilitate the realization of documentaries, serials, miniseries, animated projects or large reports.
Claudia Rodríguez Valencia, Social Communicator with emphasis in Educational Communication at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and winner of the annual unione Latina - Centro Sperimentale del Cinema scholarship (Italy), specialized in the design and development of audiovisual products and in the distribution and management of co-productions of audiovisual content of fiction, documentaries and children, was in charge of exposing the challenges that the contents have for their internationalization. "Clearly the audience is not just on the channels, we need to think beyond the screen, so it's very important to know who we're talking to." He also pointed out that the audience is not only in the channels, because it is necessary to think beyond the screen. He maintained that internationalization is a task that must be done continuously and that is why he stressed that "allying is not only selling, it is generating various types of contacts."
