Kafi Kareem on Bringing More Family Content to the Caribbean through Story Play TV

As Trinidad is leading the Caribbean into a new era of film production and distribution, Kafi Kareem is leading VOD startup Story Play TV into the world of family content.

On March 13, 2019 Story Play premieres the first short in its animated comedy series Big Man Dan, which follows Trinidadian husband and wife Dan and Sheila navigating daily life, with Dan out to prove he’s a Big Man. Their story tackles gender parity in Caribbean relationships through action-packed scenes thoughtfully woven by a Caribbean-based team of animators and sound designers.

I was introduced to Kafi virtually in 2013 while she was still living in Los Angeles, working at Disney Interactive. We finally met in person 3 years later at the Caribbean Tales Incubator in Toronto, where I got the first glimpse of endearing characters Dan and Sheila, who were still in their black and white form. Last month, we got a chance to catch up and talk all things Story Play.

Story Play Media is all about impact, boasting the slogan stories for life. Through its studios, it develops original productions like Big Man Dan and the family feature in pre-production, The Caddy Club. Kafi won best pitch for The Caddy Club at the Caribbean Film Mart 2-day workshop during the 2018 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.

This year, Story Play partnered with non-profit ROOTS Foundation TT for the social impact campaign #BigManTing, featuring a series of PSAs told through Dan, aimed at starting conversations about gender-based violence, crime, intimate partner violence and gender parity in Trinidad. The PSAs can be viewed on Story Play TV, the home of the startup’s originals and films by independent creators.

Today, you can rent or own titles like Todd Kessler’s Bazodee (starring Machel Montano and Natalie Perera), Alain Bidard’s animated feature Battledream Chronicle, and Michael Mooleedhar’s Green Days by the River. About future expansion, Kafi told me she’s looking to expand the slate of Story Play TV’s original content, with talent development and collaboration in mind.

“I’d love to see more collaboration within Trinidad and across the region. We’re a small region, impact and growth could be accelerated if more large scale projects were approached collaboratively”, she said, adding that, “as far as regional content creation goes the animation industry’s biggest lack locally is experienced content developers who can build stories, characters and worlds for visual mediums with a target market in mind”.

Animation services have become a profitable export throughout the region with more firms outsourcing talent to foreign productions than producing original content. Kafi’s goal is to build the latter saying, “there’s a huge opportunity in the regional content market for kids content. The kids market is underserved and this could be a big opportunity for the animation industry. [Outsourcing animation] is great business. We need to be developing more animated projects to sell internationally, however. There’s a market for family content with diverse character representations”.

And this representation, she clarified, spans across generations. Family content surpasses stories targeted to children or teens. Story Play is interested in content that is entertaining to all ages and is safe to consume around children, which broadens the possibilities for the types of productions that can be developed.

Rent/buy Big Man Dan on Studio Anansi TV.

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*Photos courtesy of Story Play Media