Image: Alaric McAusland takes up a new crusade.
Alaric McAusland is a fixture in the Australian industry, who has taken ATLAB from processing film to embrace the digital era, and eventually sold it to international full service company Deluxe. As he said on the phone, ‘I have always been a change manager. I took a failing lab to a six hundred employee business.’
But he has quietly slipped away from Deluxe over the last year and now formally announced that he has become the Chief Operating Officer, Head of Studio and Head of Production for Grace: a storytelling company. On the surface it makes animated music videos for kids, and earnt a Daytime Emmy and the AACTA for Best Children’s Television Series.
The first two series of Beat Bugs was made with Beyond Television, ran on Network Seven and Nick Jr, and is now on Netflix.
It looks like step towards retirement for a man who ran a solid chunk of a massive international company, whose subsidiaries like Method, Illoura and EFILM work on state of the art international productions, and whose enterprise is used to nominations for BAFTAs an Oscars. He was the Chair of Ausfilm, a non-executive director of The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) and a board councillor of Screen Producers Australia.
Really it is a bet on the future, as Grace builds its rights catalogue and goes into long form production. Besides, McAusland said indignantly, ‘In no way, shape or form is this a risk. We have only just scratched the surface. Some rights and deals we have closed already but we will talk about more – as the universe explodes into a much bigger opportunity to tell stories in a unique and global way.’
The attraction of a music based company which is well placed to take advantage of short form material for young people, and to move into new areas like VR is closely connected to his approach to the world, and the personality of its principal partner, Josh Wakely.
He and Wakely both have small children at similar stages of life. He watched Wakely take the first series of Bugs through post production at Deluxe and admired his skills. They are both used to working between Sydney and Los Angeles.
The decision came together in one moment. Wakely took him to see the series with an audience. ‘One afternoon he showed the program to some underprivileged kids in Los Angeles. I was not at all prepared for the reaction to his core demographic. It was just elated. I was seeing them in front of reimagined stories with this music we all love and seeing them connect to the music from twenty or thirty years ago.’
In a way, Wakely started his enterprise by spotting an opportunity in the rights structure of popular music. Screen usage rights are hugely expensive and often limited – but Wakely wanted something very precise. He wanted to reversion the music and use the songs as the starting point for small animated stories. He went at the hunt very systematically.
Mediaweek interviewed him two years ago about that long struggle to get the rights, living on slim pickings as he wrote feature scripts for the US market.
‘They had never given the rights before to anything like this and they kept repeating it to me. I didn’t get the rights because I had more contacts or more money – it was because they creatively got what I wanted to do. I wanted to bring the best music catalogue of all time to a new generation.’
According to McAusland, ‘He is very methodical and committed to a long term vision in a passionate way which is how Josh set about it. It took a lot of hard work and a lot of time and he needed to make the rightsholders very comfortable. He showed them his care and passion and love of the songs. There is no secret sauce to it.’
The rights were only half of the battle. He wanted major singers to do the reversioning, and hunted Robbie Williams, Sia, Pink, James Corden, The Lumineers and The Shins. They agreed.
McAusland put three years of work in one sentence: ‘He earnt the respect of his partners in the US, found supportive investors and created a production which has great appeal to networks and studios,’ Netflix stepped up to the plate, along with Network Seven in Australia.
‘I call him a once in a lifetime genius. What he has done is a form of alchemy – he has turned some of our most beloved music into incredibly empowering stories.’
As the website says,
Through Wakely, Grace has secured rights to Universal Music Group’s extensive recorded master and publishing catalogues in addition to three of the world’s most revered music publishing catalogues – Northern Songs (The Beatles), Jobete and Stone Diamond (Motown) and Bob Dylan’s entire songbook. Grace has produced and will continue to create scripted entertainment based on the songs, stories and characters found within these catalogues.
The Dylan material will not be turned into cute pre-school animations, though the idea would make an excellent Christmas dinner challenge. It will become a a live-action adult scripted series called Time Out of Mind, now being produced with Lionsgate Television for Amazon.
