Clara Machado Endemol Shine Boomdog
Clara Machado, director of Development and Scripting at Endemol Shine Boomdog, talked about Como Agua para Chocolate, the year’s star project for the company regarding fiction and adaptations of a work. Como Agua para Chocolate, a work by Laura Esquivel, was adapted in Mexico between September and December, producing six episodes of its first season.
“This project has the necessary ingredients to connect with audiences, such as a great love story, plus topics of great interest today about how women perceive themselves, the search for identity, independence, and personal relationships through family, and how this leads you to be who you are,” said Machado.
She mentioned they had to emphasize the issue of costs and optimize the use of time and money this year since, due to the economic crisis in the world, budgets have decreased, and to offer something of lower quality to clients or audiences is out of the question, especially when you are such a large production company.
“A few years ago, when I arrived at Boomdog, it was different; it was like a complete boom since the platforms had a very aggressive strategy of buying everything due to the pandemic when people were consuming a lot of content. So the platforms bought a lot of content and a lot of development, almost regardless of how much what was being written was going to cost. Now, the global crisis with a near recession in the US, the war in Ukraine and Russia, and that of Israel and Palestine have had an economic impact even on our industry and on how much the platforms are willing to invest, not to mention the competition that also exists among themselves,” she mentioned.
Machado reported that the challenge is to make engaging stories increasingly efficient so they are feasible and profitable for their clients and them. “You don’t have to rush projects, you have to let them breathe. We should invest a lot in talent and try not to focus on productions with too many explosions or car chases, but rather on good stories that connect with the audience, done in controlled locations, such as Como Agua para Chocolate.”
Finally, the interviewee gave her point of view on what a project must have to be successful, explaining that it not only has to be creative and beautiful and it doesn’t matter if everyone sees it and is a success among audiences. “The project has to be profitable. If you do something wonderful but it bankrupts the company, it is a failure even if the whole world sees it.”
