Libbie Doherty still remembers the buzz of excitement when the Heeler family made their international debut at the Asian Animation Summit in November 2016. As the commissioning editor in the ABC’s Children’s Department, she’d been the first to spot the potential in the show from Ludo Studio – but she certainly wouldn’t be the last.
“We’d given them some seed funding to make a pilot teaser,” she tells The Weekly. “The Summit is a place where networks from all over the world come to and people present their ideas. The teaser was shared, and it was a moment where everyone in the room went, ‘Okay, I think this is something’.”
‘Something’ is an understatement. would spark a bidding war with international distributors. With Australia’s ABC already locked in, UK giant BBC came next, signing up
