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 growth 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 long term 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,” she adds. BHP was also a 3D pioneer with Jewels of the World.

A turning point was reality-based travel series, Lonely Planet: Roads Less Travelled, in 2010 for Nat Geo in the U.S., on which BHP was a co-production partner. “We bought 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 is production budgets, which are smaller than elsewhere in the world.

Little says partnerships with funding bodies such as Singapore’s Media Development Authority (MDA) 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”.

The second challenge is platform
fragmentation and how that’s evolving. Plus “how we are responding to it,” Little says.

“We are content makers and we can be platform agnostic. We will always work with the great brands, but we are also looking at more short-form and digital content,” she adds.

One of BHP’s shorts for Singapore’s Changi Airport has received 4.2 million views. “It’s amazing,” Little says, adding that the new environment can be difficult “because half the time you don’t know what viewers will respond to”.

This article originally appeared in ContentAsia's eNewsletter issue 219 published on 19 October 2015.