Canada Gets A $3 Million Animated Online Comedy Program

It’s a good time for content creators north of the border. Less than a week after YouTube announced its Canadian Creator Collab Callout, Blue Ant Media and Mondo Media made their plans public for Bite on Mondo, an animated comedy initiative that will dole out $3 million in funding, distribution, and promotion to select Canadian content creators over the course of the next two years.

The program is designed to “discover breakout animated content using a unique pipeline to source, finance, test, and grow properties that will resonate both on and off YouTube.” And in order to fill that pipeline, Bite on Mondo is soliciting submissions from creators both amateur and professional starting January 15, 2014. Interested parties who believe they have exceptional programming aimed towards college-aged guys and are able to assemble a 5-10 page pitch bible, 2-4 page script, an audio assembly of a sequence or an episode, and/or a storyboard or animatic are encouraged to submit their ideas to Bite.ca/BiteOnMondo starting right now.

Executives at Blue Ant Media and Mondo Media will select 30 pilots from all the submissions and then test, measure, and evaluate those pilots based on their YouTube “popularity, audience feedback, and sustainability for scaling into multi-episode orders or longer formats.” Once testing is complete, the pilots with the highest scores will go onto to receive more funding for future episodes, and even possibly appear on television by way of Canada’s Bite TV

(which is owned by Blue Ant Media).

The goal here is that Bite On Mondo will discover the next Happy Tree Friends (one of Mondo Media’s flagship properties that has aired worldwide on the web and in over 30 international markets on TV) or Dick Figures (a Mondo Media breakout series that just released a full-length feature film).

“We’ve already sourced several great shows from Canada like Gundarr from Corey McDaniel and Ted Wilson in Vancouver and Newshit from Nick denBoer (best known for his hilarious work on Conan) in Toronto,” said John Evershed, CEO of Mondo Media. “I’m really excited to see what kinds of strange, laugh out loud shows emerge from this project.”