Screaming Flea’s VP of program development, Liza Keckler, graced The Monarch with some time to chat about her company’s strategies, how they work with the city of Seattle to produce content and how Skype is ruining her day!

Jake Uitti: What is Screaming Flea’s top couple of priorities for the next few years in terms of content production?

Liza Keckler: Our priorities for the next few years continue to be essentially the same since our foundation in 1999.

Our core business is in non-fiction content for cable television – that includes lots of different genres like lifestyle, how-to shows, reality, formats, cooking, makeover, crime procedurals and documentaries. Our clients typically are cable networks but everyone is seeing some changes there as new distribution channels are created and find success.

We also serve clients locally, producing ads, creating promotional videos for companies of all kinds and webisodes for anything you can imagine. Basically, if there is a story to be told using video and audio – we can tell it.

We want to continue to be a leader in this very competitive market and make great content.

JU: What do you think is the greatest benefit the city of Seattle can offer to Screaming Flea and, in turn, what are the biggest challenges for the company located here in the Emerald City?

LK: The city really offers us the ability to be outside the industry bubble – we have a different perspective than the LA and NYC production companies. That helps us tremendously when coming up with creative content and framing some of the same old types of shows a little differently.

The biggest challenge we find in being here is the flip side of the benefit. Because we’re not in the industry center I have to get on a plane more frequently.

JU: How does the city of Seattle shape your perspective as content producers?

LK: Seattle has a vibrant creative community – but Screaming Flea is a bit of an outlier: we do reality TV, nonfiction, drama, we don’t do scripted work in any way and our production is very specific as a result.

We have great editors and writers that we work with but that pool is kind of limited here because there aren’t a lot of production companies and people with the specific skills needed for long form nonfiction television production. Most of the people we work with are freelancers.

We had four shows happening last year and we had to stock up with people in L.A. to get it all done. There are tons of editors who are really talented but people who have experience doing the type of long form content that we do is short, maybe 10 to 12 folks in town.

It can be fun though – there are other companies like us in other major American cities and we can talk with them, collaborate with them, and you don’t get the same sort of group-think that you might get in LA or NYC. It allows us to think outside the box and get a lot of different ideas.

JU: Does Screaming Flea have plans to grow the talent pool/production end of the scene here in Seattle?

LK: We would love to grow it. The problem there is having the projects to grow the talent with. I’m always looking for projects but we have to have a buyer to commission those projects and then we would have the steady workload to staff up and train and grow. There are lots of ideas churning but there isn’t necessarily the funding. I think I have to come up with 100 ideas to get to one paid development deal, to make a sizzle reel. Ten of those sizzles to get one pilot and ten pilots to get one series. It’s a numbers game. In other words, we have lots of ideas, but funding isn’t always the easiest thing to secure.

JU: Screaming Flea is working with our bud, Bobbi Rich, on her show, Hangin Tuff – that’s great!

LK: Yeah, Bobbi is so talented, I love her! And all of what she’s done has been self-funded, a labor of love. We’re looking into Hangin Tuff for longer format. The webisodes are pretty short, so we’re looking to stretch them into 22 minutes. She’s got a great vision. I’m really impressed with her work. And that’s a great example of how we look to Seattle for inspiration!

JU: What are you working on today?

LK: I’m trying to figure out how to video conference four people and record it using Skype or something. Once you add that fourth person something drops out and I’m really annoyed (laughs). We’ve got a team of people that we’re talking to and trying to get on video to see – we love what they do – and Discovery likes the idea but they want to see the people who run it on camera, to get a sense of character.