Marlene Sharp, Pink Poodle Productions

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Well, welcome back friends to our podcast, Unlocking Your World of Creativity, where we travel around the world to talk to creative practitioners about how they get inspired and how they organize their ideas and ha gain the confidence and connections to launch their work out into the world. And if you know the work of Sonic the Hedgehog, whether it's a cartoon network or the film, any and many more Japanese video game-based franchises, then you know the work of our guests today, Marlene Sharp. Marlene, welcome to the program.

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Thank you. Yes. That's me, . Yeah,

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That's right. Well, Marlene has a great company called The Pink Poodle Productions Company, and I, I think there's a lot of meaning behind that name we we'll explore too. But Marlene, you've gained quite a reputation and quite a following in this video game based franchise, you know, turning these ideas from video games into all sorts of animation or film. What, what was the interest, what was the genesis of that? How did that develop for you?

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Well, I started out in, in this particular part of the business through temping, through working through a temp agency years and years ago. Um, so my original dream was to perform, and, and it still is a, a dream and unfortunately more of a dream than a reality at this point. But, um, but, and also I'll just quickly introduce my my collaborator because she is making herself known on my lap at this point. But this, this is the poodle of

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Poodle. There is the

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Poodle Pink Poodle Productions, although she is a bean poodle mix, but for the purposes of our business, she will identify as either or both . Yeah. oh. She's having a, a little cough, little

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Cough there.

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Oh, okay. It's, yeah, You

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Take care of that. Well also, you know, I'm curious if, you know, we think about all manner of creative methods and techniques compare and contrast a little bit for us, the approach to animation or bringing some of these video game characters to life, you know, compared to maybe writing a book or, you know writing a song or, you know, painting a painting. What, what is your creative approach when you take on a project like this?

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Well, usually my, my approach is to stay employed and, um, to not get in trouble. . I know it might sound like, um, kind like bursting the bubble or dispelling the myth, but, um, but there are a lot of ways to not be employed and to get in trouble. So, um, so yeah, so I, I cannot lie and say that developing video game characters was my dream as a girl. It was not. Um, my dream was to have the career of somebody like Tina Faye or Reese Witherspoon, um, so to, to act in things. And then for people just to think I was so great to give me the opportunity to write stuff for myself and just have things falling into my lap at a rapid pace and, and like girly things, like well, because I'm a girl, um, I, I enjoyed playing video games well enough as a kid, but, um, it wasn't really a career path. But, um, but when I graduated from graduate school in performing arts, I have an mfa, a musical theater, I was only really qualified to either perform or not really anything else. maybe wait tables. And even that was iffy because I'm not very coordinated at like, carrying things and customer service type of scenarios. I get very scared and intimidated with, with people yelling at me. Although I do have a lot of experience with people yelling at me in the entertainment business.

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Yes. One of that goes with the creative territory.

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Yes. But, um, but I, I was interested in working, working in the business, in, in, I, I was interested in all different aspects of, of the entertainment industry, um, deal making and writing and producing, especially as it concerned me because, um, there aren't as many roles for, for women. And I'm a a, I'm a character woman. not a, not really a leading lady. Much, much to my chagrin, as I learned quickly when I got it to Hollywood. So, um, so I, like I said, I fell into this video game driven content business through my first temp job. And I was working for a company called Bandi. Well, I was working for a gentleman who had just, um, not long before, had retired from being the president of Bandi America, which worked, He worked closely with Bandi Japan, um, which owned Power Rangers at the time.

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And lots of other intellectual properties that stemmed from Japan. And then, um, the, the intent was to export them to other places worldwide. So Power Rangers had done very well in that regard. And so he had a lot of projects that he, he was responsible, my boss, his name was Frank Ward, he had retired from Bandi, but retained a, an exclusive consulting arrangement with them. And so, um, he, he would get a lot of material from Japan, and the Japanese headquarters would say, What, what can you do with this outside of Japan? And oftentimes it would include recutting the footage and making a more, um, three act structure. A lot of the anime that we received was very stream of consciousness storytelling. And so that, that's not ideal for western audiences that are us used to a beginning, middle, and end. That's right.

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And, um, so, so we, we would, but we were not ever really concerned with making great art. We were concerned with selling toys. And that is what, 99, I would say 99% of the kids entertainment business is about. It's, it's first to sell stuff and to sustain a bi sustain a business, mostly through consumer products. Um, and of course, everybody likes to win Emmys and feel that they're artistic and you know, making great great content that will survive and be taught in literature and film studies classes for years to come. But that's not so much the reality. And I, my old boss, Frank, had some really great quotes that he would tell the writers of the series. Um, one of my favorites was, um, were not, we're not, we're not winning awards. We're selling toys. , we're not. And then he would also, he would follow that up by saying like, I don't wanna see a script that's this big.

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It needs to be this big meaning printed out because he wanted it to be all action and all toy, you know, we would have to follow the production or follow the development and then the production to make sure that the toys were being played with in the correct play pattern to make kids want to buy them and imitate that, that role playing in real life. Mm-hmm. . Right. So, so, um, so there wasn't a lot of artfulness involved. There was a lot, there was creativity in the sense that we we had to disguise the fact that we were selling so much because we, it wa it wasn't supposed to be just a, a commercial for, for toys, but it, it, so there needed to be storytelling, but it wasn't, um, it wasn't like mounting a Shakespearean play in the university setting. Oh,

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You're describing an interesting overlap between the Yeah. Sort of creative and the business. Yes. It's great to talk about the pop culture names like Power Rangers and, and Sonic the Hedgehog. But, you know, your other work in strategy and acquisitions and licensing and, and all the other, what's the business side of this that we need to understand?

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Well, the kids in family business, it's very important to, so to keep in mind co co viewing experiences. So, so while you are trying to make content and then toys and consumer, consumer products that are appealing to kids, most kids don't have their own discretionary income to buy these things. So you must appeal to the parents as well, but not appeal to them in an edgy, grown up way. You're, it's, it's a more wholesome and inclusive experience, rather than say like, um, a a a violent movie like John Wick or something of that, of that nature. And so, um, also it's very important from the beginning to think about the consumer products plan because I, if it's an afterthought, it's harder, it's harder to establish a cohesiveness amongst all the different branches of the, of the iterations of the intellectual property. So, um, I, I think Power Rangers, while it's not the greatest production value in the sense that what you see on the screen, you wouldn't necessarily say it was the best at anything.

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It has been very effective in, in selling toys. And oftentimes, well, part of the reason for that is that it was developed by a toy company. So a toy company, instead of syncing all this money into traditional advertising, billboards and, um, TV commercials, they put more money into doing a series that would, that would have some chance of recouping the investment and wouldn't be so limited as far as, um, the, the timeframe. So like, a commercial is gonna get stale pretty quickly, and a company's not usually able to monetize it. But with, when a brand makes content, it will live in a category a catalog that will be a able to be monetized over time. And so that helps to offset the investment. But, but with kids and family content, the consumer products plan, it, it, it seems to work best if it's incorporated from the very beginning.

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And, and if everybody who's working on it is in agreement that this, this is, we're, we're servicing the brand, we're not servicing someone's ego unless that's the person paying the pay paychecks. Like, unless it's like when I worked at Level Five, which is another Japanese video game company, um, there is a man who started the company. He know San and he know San is very much in O Tour. And the, the company is, is he knows San, So there we were serving, he know son's initiatives cause he was, he was the brains behind the operation. But, um, when it's a company like Sego where there are a lot of different stakeholders and and so forth, um, and then we had, when I worked on Sonic Boom, the TV series, we had a lot of different co-production partners of course. So, um, here at Pink Poodle Productions, we really just work to make Blanch happy. That's

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Right. Whatever keeps the poodle happy.

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Exactly. And right now she's getting a little antsy item, Not sure why. This is our first Zoom of the day. And she usually, she usually has a, a, a bigger to thanks for Zoom. But today she's, um, she's calling Time for other quickly, but bla look at the, look at the camera, people wanna see you

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Say, Hi, bla, you're

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In demand. Mar

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Marlene, let's bring it up to date. Then you're working on another family friendly project and tell us about that.

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Yeah. Um, I'm working on a film trilogy called Young Captain Nemo, based on a book trilogy called Young Captain Nemo. And the, the company that is behind it is called Rain Shine Entertainment and Rain Shine is based in Mumbai in India. And then there is a small team of us working here out of Los Angeles to, well, there's a, there's a core team of, um, four of us that work on other initiatives for the company as well as Young Captain Nemo. And then we've just hired several folks to come on board just for the movie. So, um, people specific to animation, but Rain does a lot of different kinds of projects, not just animation. Umhe is well known in, in the region for podcasts as well as live action dramas and reality shows and comedy and all kinds of things.

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Wonderful. Now, in addition to this, you also have a personal passion for creating programs for viewers with autism. And there's some special creative, you know, challenges and special creative parameters that you like to bring to bear. I hope you tell us a little bit about that.

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Yeah, so, um, I mentor a special group of artists at a school called The Center for the Center for Learning Unlimited. It's in Torrance, California, which is part of Los Angeles. And so the school has kindergarten through 12th grade curriculum. And what grew out of that, the, because that, that program has been around for about 20 something years, but what grew out of that was an animation career training program for adults on the autism spectrum. So I worked specifically with that program. So it's adults 18 and over mainly. Um, well, they're all high school graduates and they're, the ages range between 18 and probably 40 at this point. So it's not, it's lot of, lot of diversity and age range and backgrounds and so forth. And so, so there's a three year training program that's a certificate program. And then when the students finish that program, they can go into brainstorm productions, which is the companion studio. And the studio serves as traditional like a, a traditional studio that would take work for hire opportunities and, and we do some original stuff, um, original content as well. And it's it's a bridge between the academic program and, um, working at a big studio, third party studio. So yeah, it's, it's

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A very, it's a great initiative.

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Yes, yes, indeed.

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Yeah. And so what sort of, I guess what am I trying to think of, practical, creative challenges do you have there?

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Well, the, the students are very adaptable and flexible. I find that the the, the biggest challenge was when I came on board, the, the program was already in its third year. And so I, um, stepped in there to give advice on, well, basically to be the entertainment industry liaison. So the, the students were very focused on life drawing and technique. They were also learning Maya software. And so, um, so it was very much focused on practical aspects of producing animation, you know, navigating the software and, and what you would need to do to put something on a screen, but not so much navigating the business of entertainment. So, so, um, so I've tried to bring in a lot of guest speakers for the students and also for the instructor. So I, I I like to joke that, um, that the biggest the biggest challenge was working with the instructors as a part, most of the students because, because I was coming in it, it seemed like I was coming in and shaking things up by injecting, you know, all these industry pros who would come and talk.

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And then, and then also I was very vocal about, okay, we need to instill an entrepreneurial spirit here, or encourage the, because there was, there, there were students who were doing their own YouTube channels and, you know, selling commissioned work. And, um, so that, that's something that, that's fantastic because it, it's just the studio grind of, you know, working on a, let's say a Disney or a Pixar film is not for everybody. That's right. And especially with the Neurodiverse population, it, it's even more, it's more challenging for a variety of reasons. And so I think that the more we can, we can have them become the one one person studios and, and work independently, especially when Covid came around and everybody was working independently, even if you were on a crew, you were still at home and responsible for budgeting your time and whatever. I, I thought that was advantageous. And so, um, so I I, I came, you know, blazing in there and injecting all this, this new thinking. And so, um, sometimes it, it was great and sometimes it, it took some convincing yes and

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Whatnot as it is, and almost any creative endeavor. But this one is particularly commendable and encouraging Thanks for this work.

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Oh yeah, it's a pleasure.

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And getting to know you, we discovered that we both have some roots back in Louisiana Yes. Street port and Baton Rouge, you and New Orleans. Let's imagine there we are at Cafe Duall having a coffee and a bin day. Um, how did those kind of southern roots prepare you for the creative you know, career path that you're on today?

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Well, I have to say that the most cutthroat people that I ever collaborated with were in New Orleans and not in Hollywood. So I, I feel like the mean girl experience that I, cuz I went all through Catholic schools, as is very common in New Orleans, went to an all girls Catholic high school. And so that I I I just expected the hard knocks. I just braced myself. And when I came here to Los Angeles, it was kind of like, oh, well this, this feels rather familiar. Like it might not feel great, but it's not like a new,

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It's not like you didn't know how to use your elbows.

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Exactly, exactly. I I know this grind, I, it's very familiar. So so there is that. And also it's quite delightful to tell people that you're from New Orleans because everyone seems to love it, which is great because I will admit that I am the worst New Orleans ambassador ever. Cause I could not get, I could not wait to get out of there From the time that I realized that show business was not, it did not originate in New Orleans where projects maybe would film there every once in a while, but not, not really originate there. I I was all about getting out and getting, getting to the, the big stuff. So, and then also, I'm just not, I, I don't know if you've found this to be true, but I don't drink and I don't like football. And those are two,

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These are big prerequisites,

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Make you a total outcast. I like books. I like nerdy, like nerdy and not, not necessarily nerd culture, although I am in that business now. But, but you know stu I was into like doing well in school, like that kind of nerdy stuff, like reading, following rules, not partying too much, you know, just very, very lowkey kind of stuff. And that's not really embraced there either. , so actually here, you, you in, in, in Los Angeles, there's a lot of hype about the culture of Hollywood and, and people, you know, celebrities, misbehaving and so forth. But for the most part I find that people are very career conscious here and people buckle down and work insane hours and, um, will make all kinds of sacrifices for their careers and stuff. And that, that's more relatable to me than going to a Saints game and, um, getting hammered. Yes. So

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Exactly. Well, as we, as we talk about this, I think I give a shout out to one of my previous guests who lives in the south of France, but has family in New Orleans and we keep promising that we're gonna meet in New Orleans sometimes for those coffee and beignets. So shout out to Naela Lata si in the south of France. And if you're listening, let's get together for that coffee in New Orleans and then let's go back and, and to our places of work and get down to business

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. Yes. Well it's the greatest place in the world to eat. That is for sure. That is for sure. It is the best. Yeah. You can't, you can't beat the food there. And, and there's, there is a lot to do. And if you love history, that's a wonderful place for history and architecture and those types of things. It's certainly a, a pleasure to vacation there. I like to, when I go back, do some of the tourist things and it's really nice. Yes.

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Well, Marlene, you've told some great stories. I really appreciate you coming on the show and before we end, I wanna make sure people know how to find you and connect with you and learn more about your work.

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Sure. Well, I am a maniac on LinkedIn, so if you really wanna find me, you don't have to look very hard on LinkedIn cuz I'm posting a lot and I'm also on all the usual suspects like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and various other places. If you Google me, you'll, you'll find me as a guest on a lot of podcasts and um, I always have a million projects going on cuz of my busy body nature. So, um, I love that. So I'm out there and, and easily accessible. And also my website, pink poodle productions.com can send messages to me there too.

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Perfect. Well, we'll have all those links in the show notes. Well, Marlene, before we go, you, you've told about how you got into the business and kind of the practical ways you've moved around the business. Give some advice, I guess, or at least encouragement and motivation to listeners of the podcast who might be saying, I just don't know how to break in, you know, I don't know how to start. I have this dream, I have this idea, I know I can do the work. how, how do I make those connections? What works for you?

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Well, being proactive is, is very helpful. So, so and, and being proactive. It, it, it's, it involves, in my opinion, it involves self-promotion and I know a lot of people are uncomfortable with that, but you can find sneaky ways to do it. like social media, for example. Um, posting, posting pictures or videos of things that you've, you've done that you've created. Um, also entering film festivals and competitions. If you, if you for, you can enter your screenplays, you can enter photography, you can, there are all kinds of, of ways and, um, but also be open to possibilities because you just, you never know when something will fall into your lap. Um, but not in an obvious way. So like, be open to talking to that person in front of, of you in line at the grocery store, or, um, you can go to a film festival as an attendee and chances are very good that you will run into at least one person there who is in this, in the same business or in wants to do the same things as you.

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It's, um, so it's just keeping an open mind, also keeping an open mind and, and being nice to everybody really. Um, it doesn't, I I I don't find that it's helpful to, to look down on people or, um, dismiss people as not being relevant to whatever it is that you're doing. Of course some people make a career out of that, but, um, but I find it much more conducive to good karma as well as just good things happening to, to be kind to everyone and to, to help anyone who needs. If you're able to help somebody else, then it just puts those good vibes out in the world and it makes it more likely that someone would do the same for you. Absolutely.

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Nice. Two way street. Well, thanks for that insight and I know that's based on the both experience and, you know, watching others, but also Yeah. Living through some of those connections. So thanks for sharing that.

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Yes, my pleasure.

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Well, we've traveled to LA today. We've been right in the middle of Hollywood, but we took a little side trip to New Orleans , but we're gonna continue our around the world journey to talk to creative practitioners like our guest today, Marlene Sharp, Marlene, can't thank you enough for being on the show.

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Thank you, Mark. It was so much fun. Thank you for ho

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Hosting again,

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Blanch and I

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Yes, that Blanch was terrific as well. . Well listeners come back for our next episode. We'll continue to explore how to develop new and creative ideas, but also how to organize those ideas, make the connections, gain the confidence, get into the game to launch your creative work out into the world. So until next time, I'm Mark Stinson and we're unlocking your world of creativity. We'll see you next time.