Singapore-based production house, Beach House Pictures, has just turned 10. Co-founder and managing director, Jocelyn Little, looks at a decade’s worth of travel, adventure, snakes, kids and the reality of local production in Asia.

Singapore-based Beach House Pictures (BHP) celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, marking a decade of growth from adventure travel to multi-genre production credits. That’s along with expanding from two people to 65 full-time staff across four divisions – Beach House Pictures, Beach House Kids, Beach House Entertainment (reality formats) and Beach House Studios (apps, animation and design). Today, Beach House is one of the largest indie production houses in the region. About 60% of production is factual, 10% is reality and kids is 20%-30%.

“The highlights have been breaking into new genres and proving ourselves,” says Jocelyn Little, who established the company in 2005 with partner and creative director Donovan Chan.

The biggest initial challenge “was that we were both production people,” Little says. The other challenge was “making our name and getting people to trust that we could deliver”.

BHP’s first project was with Lonely Planet, with whom Little already had a relationship, on Lonely Planet Six Degrees. The second major project was Man Made Marvels with NHNZ (which has since become an equity partner in BHP) and Discovery, which Little says has been “great in supporting local talent”.

“We had a couple of big projects early on so we had a bit of cache in trying to create new projects,” Little says. Over the years, these have included natural history (Asia’s Deadliest Snakes), kids (Kids vs Film for Discovery Asia), social docs and lifestyle. BHP was also a 3D pioneer with Jewels of the World.

A turning point was reality-based travel series, Lonely Planet: Road Less Travelled, in 2010 for National Geographic in the U.S., on which BHP was a co-production partner. “We brought money to the table and it established us as a company that could not only pull together a production but also finance and deliver,” Little says.

The biggest challenge facing indie producers in Asia at the moment is production budgets, which are smaller than elsewhere in the world. Little says partnerships with funding bodies such as Singapore’s Media Development Authority are important. And, for BHP at least, co-productions have been critical. “We want to build our own IP. We want bigger budgets. That’s a challenge that has always been there,” she says, adding: “As a company, if we want to be succeeding we have to be pulling in partners from all over the world”. (A version of this interview appeared in ContentAsia Enewsletter on 21 September 2015)

This article first appeared in ContentAsia Issue 4, 2015, published in September 2015