Cartoonist takes mobile leap into Vodafone 3G

Peter Bromhead

What happens when you turn a 72-year-old political cartoonist loose on third-generation mobile technology?

You get the animated political and social satire of Peter Bromhead jumping into the top 10 of Vodafone's most-viewed 3G live mobile phone content.

Vodafone New Zealand's head of live and data services, Tim Nichols, took a punt on Bromhead's groundbreaking foray into animated political cartoons late last year.

For now, Vodafone has to play second fiddle to TV3's Campbell Live which first contracted Bromhead's one-minute "doodlebug" (OMD) cartoon for a weekly screening, but Nichols said he was confident enough with the results of the "wild card" he played to consider commissioning original work from the cartoonist.

"In an ideal world, you'd have it before TV3, but the way the contract plays out TV3 has the marketing clout. I'm almost performing a service behind that - if you miss it you can catch it [Bromhead] on Vodafone live."

Auckland-based Bromhead, a newspaper political satirist for more than 30 years, with a day job as a successful international interior designer, will be pleased to read of Nichols' enthusiasm.

He too has taken a punt, plunging $50,000 into technology to make his transit from print cartoon to animated satire. Each weekly, one-minute animation for TV3, then passed to Vodafone, costs $5000, and he is bankrolling it himself. His research tells him he is the first political satirist and cartoonist worldwide to make the leap to animation - probably because of the cost and labour intensity.

Bromhead has big plans for his new animation business, Wooden Spoon Productions, created last year after Act Party president Catherine Judd asked him to do an animated cartoon for television during the general election campaign to help return Rodney Hide to Parliament.

Bromhead was not keen - he preferred to remain neutral, sniping from the trenches. But he took the job on as a "challenge". He said he had been late to start new ventures all his life - he was 38 when he started cartooning.

After completing the ad and getting the hang of animation, he approached Ian Fraser, former chief executive of TVNZ, with a couple of story scripts. TVNZ "ummed and ahhed" so he went to TV3, which offered him a contract.

The time between the first animated story line and contract signing with TV3 was less than six weeks, but the work involved getting an OMD to screen is gruelling. Between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday lunch, Bromhead churns out more than 300 drawings on computer, which are then processed in studio. Once a OMD has screened, Vodafone can offer it as a download or a video stream.

Nichols said Bromhead's approach came as he was building a live content platform after the telco's 3G launch in August last year; 3G technology enables real-time two-way video calls, full music track downloads, mobile TV channel watching, as well as "second generation" phone and txt services.

"Having an amazing capability enhancer is not much use unless you've got great content to go with it. We'd been working with TV3 to create a compelling video content platform. We got together with Peter and then looked at where it [OMD] was being placed, in the middle of Campbell, a hugely important show for my demographics [male, 18 to 35]," Nichols said.

"I thought it will have a cult following. It's quirky. It's associated with a creator artist already known from the press, it's him stepping into new media and he carries a certain amount of cachet with him.

"It's topical, it's timely and it's a short piece of content which is quite key. So it's working for me."

* Born: England

* Age: 72.

* Work: Newspaper political cartoonist for 30 years, turned animator.

* A former curator Auckland Art Gallery.

* Interior designer - Bromhead Design.

* Believes he has a world first.

* International plans.