The Oznoz VOD platform is a streaming channel and its content is also available on mobile devices such as iPad and Android. Top Nelvana titles include favorites such as Babar, Franklin, Beyblade, Bakugan, Scaredy Squirrel, Ruby Gloom and other children’s classics.

Colin Bohm, Vice President, Head of Corus Kids said: “We’re thrilled to be part of the top notch lineup on Oznoz. Kids and families in the U.S. will now have access to a multilingual library of beloved Nelvana series that are already enjoyed in many territories around the world.”

This is the first time Nelvana’s library will be available to U.S. audiences in so many languages. Nelvana joins top kids content providers Sesame Street and HIT Entertainment, which have also signed multi-year exclusive deals with Oznoz.

Aly Jetha, CEO of Oznoz said, “We are ecstatic that Nelvana has entrusted us with their children’s brands and welcome them to the Oznoz family. More importantly, I’m thrilled that my daughter will now be able to enjoy Babar, Franklin and other great Nelvana titles in German!”

On Oznoz, customers can sample new releases by viewing the first episode for free. Shows can be streamed or downloaded for offline viewing via the popular Oznoz Video App for iOS and Android. Nelvana titles will be available on Oznoz.com beginning this month.

About Oznoz
Oznoz.com provides “stuff for bilingual kids,” including cartoons and books in eleven languages. Current offerings are in Arabic, English, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, French, German, Korean, Spanish and Hindi. Popular titles include Elmo’s World, Bob the Builder®, Angelina Ballerina®, Babar, Super Why, 1001 Nights and Thomas & Friends®. Oznoz features a multitude of bilingual books with famous titles like “Dear Zoo”, “Wheels on the Bus” and “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” The channel covers ages 0-14 and includes animation, live-action, stop motion and much more. The Oznoz iPad app and the Oznoz Android app allow kids to watch videos on the go. Oznoz was founded by Aly Jetha and Shabnam Rezaei, a husband and wife team who also started Big Bad Boo, an animation studio that produces culturally rich, educational TV series like Mixed Nutz and 1001 Nights.

About Nelvana
Nelvana is a world-leading international producer and distributor of children’s animated and live-action content. Nelvana is comprised of Nelvana Studio and its distribution arm Nelvana Enterprises and owned by Corus Entertainment Inc. Nelvana Studio produces a stable of award-winning and globally renowned brands that focus on comedies, preschool and boys action series and ancillary consumer products programs. Nelvana’s content airs on Corus Entertainment’s kids channels in Canada and in over 160 countries around the world. The Nelvana library has well over 4,000 episodes of programming and has received over 70 major international program awards including Emmys® and Geminis. Visit the Nelvana website at nelvana.com.

# # #

For more information, please contact:
Nina Gabriadze / Oznoz
212.960.8980 / nina@oznoz.com

And it was a small sort of side venture that we had both stepped into. That did really well. Babak and Friends did very well. We screened it in over 40 museums across the world and showed it in Apple stores. And based on that, we realized that there was a big gap in the market for culturally rich content for immigrant families. If you’re an immigrant living in North America, how do you hold onto your culture and your language and teach those traditions to children? And out of that came the idea of Mixed Nutz, which is we like to say, the Peanuts for international children.

It’s a show about four kids who are from four different countries and their daily adventures in school and at home. Babak is the boy from Iran. Plus we have Damaris from Cuba. And there’s Jae, who’s Korean, and Sanjay, who’s Indian.

And all the things that they go through, as an example, we have Jay’s grandfather coming to visit from Korea. And in that episode, they sort of go head to head. They have a language barrier and a generational barrier. We explore those issues in a really fun way. Mixed Nutz is going to be on PBS later this year.

Mixed Shades
We believed really strongly in the social value of what we wanted to create. We felt that major stations were not representing the minorities on television. So while you have a show like Maya and Miguel or you have Dora, they’re not really getting to the core of the cultural issues. And they’re not really getting specific to representing an ethnicity.

As an example, we took Mixed Nutz to a very large corporation to pitch them the idea to raise money for it. And this was an entertainment company. They said, “Well, we really like the idea. But why don’t we take Jae, and instead of Jae being Korean, we’ll make him Asian, you know, because that will hit a larger demographic.” And we thought, “Well, that’s exactly what’s wrong with what’s on television right now is that you’re trying to think of it as demographics as opposed to, ‘Well, maybe the Korean holiday of Thanksgiving is really interesting. So why don’t we explore that? And Americans would be interested in that. And other people are interested in that.'” So while we’re learning and teaching kids something, we’re also getting the benefit of the entertainment value.

I mean, part of the problem, I think, is in the creation and development of stories. We don’t have enough diverse people writing the stories and representing typical issues that are happening every day in American homes. It’s sort of the same thing with the Winning Woman program. You know, you want to have enough women represented in corporations so that it’s sort of well-balanced. That’s exactly what we’re getting in the entertainment and media. I mean, if you turn on the television right now, there’s just not enough color on television in terms of representing all the different shades of people that are living in this country.

So that’s definitely our mission; that’s where our sweet spot is. And with Mixed Nutz, we’re definitely carving out that space.

Building A Business
Some of it was our own funding. So we had labor in kind. We also had our initial investments in the firm. And some of the money came from foundations that believed in the cultural value and the social value of what we were doing. Because with these cartoons, obviously, we can reach a really large population. It’s a very scalable business that has some social value attached to it.

We raised that money and sort of went blind and developed the show. We opened up our own animation studio in Vancouver, Canada, because there are a lot of tax credits there and the animation talent is just superb. In fact, Pixar just opened up a studio there a few months ago–they’re doing their short programs there. So we’re in Vancouver with a large animation studio, and we developed and produced the show entirely on our own. And then we went out and showed it to PBS. We have been able to reach over 26 different educational stations in the U.S. alone.

Right now we’re really excited. We’re working on our next show, which is called 1,001 Nights. It’s the ancient tales. It’s better known here as Arabian Nights. And some of the stories you would know from the Arabian Nights or stories like Aladdin, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Sinbad. Now there are 998 other stories that have never been animated and never been told. So we had the idea of making that into a TV series.

Every episode starts with Shahrzad, the famous storyteller, which has never been animated. And the situation in the Persian court where we open up with the kids, they get into a fight, Shahrzad comes in. And she says, “Don’t fight. Learn to share.” And she tells a story that’s related to what’s going on. And typically it will be a story from 1,001 Nights. And we try to infuse a lot of comedy into it. So we’re producing that show right now in Vancouver.

Diversity of Voices
We’re all about all kinds of products and all ways of reaching children. We’re looking at, for example, iPhone apps right now. IPhone is huge. There is the pass back, what we call the pass back in the industry, which is a parent is driving their kid around and they have their iPhone and they passed it back to the child to keep them entertained. And that could be an educational game or it could just be interaction with the characters from the show.

And we also have an online presence. Obviously, now, that’s a huge, huge place for us. We have educational games that feature the characters. We have an extended online experience with those characters in the shape of downloads and wallpaper and coloring sheets and all kinds of goodies so that we can reach our audience directly. We have and online distribution platform that we’re building right now called Oznoz.com. And the idea with Oznoz is while we’re reaching these immigrant families that are interested in Mixed Nutz, they might be interested in other cultural and language teaching tools for their kids. So now we’re not just producing the content ourselves and selling it, we’re also procuring other content from other producers that are all about teaching culture and teaching language.

And that site is specifically, you know, Korean, Chinese, Iranian, Hindi. It’s divided up by language so that if a parent is interested in their child watching a program in Hindi, let’s say, in different age groups, they can do that. And they can grow up bilingual, which is happening a lot now in this world, not just in North America. People are more and more diverse, more and more mixed up. Families are from two different countries or two different races. And it’s becoming more and more important to embrace those values and to make the child feel that both of those cultures are important. And they should embrace that.

Original Link: http://www.bigbadboo.ca/index.php/newsdetail/nid/82/Transcript:TeachingTraditions

Vancouver’s Big Bad Boo Studios earning worldwide reputation for multicultural cartoons Shabnam Rezaei and her husband, Burnaby-raised entrepreneur Aly Jetha formed Big Bad Boo Studios, making Vancouver their production headquarters, with New York their sales and marketing office. Their goal is to sell culturally-rich cartoons that nurture language learning — and deliver fun along the way.

Cartoons stole Shabnam Rezaei’s heart when she was a child but her head took another couple of decades to surrender to the same enchantment.

Rezaei runs Big Bad Boo Studios, a Vancouver-based animation house making a name for itself around the world with multi-cultural cartoons. Its award-winning 1001 Nights cartoon, based on the ancient Middle Eastern tales, is watched in 70 countries and 15 languages.

Rezaei, 39, is happy, fulfilled, challenged. That’s fine — but she was supposed to be happy, fulfilled and challenged in a more virtuous field.

“An Iranian family puts a lot of pressure on you to do well and there are only a few professions respected in the culture,” she says. “Literally, it’s being a doctor or an engineer. Those are the only occupations — otherwise you’re no good.”

Rezaei’s mother, a gynecologist, and her father, an engineer, would have been horrified if they thought cartoons were seeding their young daughter’s future passion.

Rezaei’s diet of Farsi language animation was interrupted at age 10 when her parents moved her and her brother from Tehran to Vienna. Her parents had feared her 13-year-old brother would be drafted when he turned 14 and tossed into the front lines in Iran’s war with Iraq.

In Vienna, Rezaei attended an international school where classes were in English. After school, she learned German by watching Vicky the Viking, Maya the Bee and The Smurfs — auf Deustch, baby.

Even today, Rezaei sustains her French-speaking skills by devotedly watching Musti, a popular French cartoon

“If you put kids in front of a television showing a different language, within five days they’ll begin to speak that language,” she says.

Rezaei did well by the Smurfs. In 1995, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a dual degree — a BA in German Literature and a BSc in computer science.

An executive MBA from New York University came a few years later while Rezaei was working full-time for financial services firm Exis Consulting. It took two years of attending classes on alternate Fridays and Saturdays to earn the degree.

“I had absolutely no social life,” she says. “I learned a lot.”

Bored in New York

Rezaei moved on to Misys Banking Systems, also in New York. Misys listed on the London Stock Exchange while she was there, acquiring a market cap of more than a billion British pounds.

Things should have been terrific. She was making good money and her parents, impressed by her success, were cutting her oodles of slack.

But Rezaei was bored. Not by her work, employer, colleagues or clients. But by the future.

She asked herself what the best thing that could befall her at Misys would be. The answer was that she could become CEO.

That possibility left her heart cold.

“You kind of look in the mirror and go ‘What the hell am I doing here if that’s the greatest thing that could happen to me and I’m not excited about it?”

On the side, she started PersianMirror.com, an online magazine about Persian culture. An American-Iranian working in animation contacted her through PersianMirror about a script called Babak and Friends — A First Norooz.

Using cartoons to expose children to different cultures

Rezaei and her husband, Burnaby-raised entrepreneur Aly Jetha, realized that exposing children to different cultures through cartoons was a good idea.

They formed Norooz Productions. In 2007, they learned of B.C.’s animation industry while visiting Jetha’s mom in Vancouver.

The two renamed the company Big Bad Boo Studios in a play on ‘Boo,’ Jetha’s nickname for his wife. They made Vancouver their production headquarters, with New York their sales and marketing office.

Their goal was to sell culturally rich cartoons that nurture language learning — and deliver fun along the way.

“We call ourselves president and president,” she says. “We just divvy up the work based on our skill sets.”

They soon discovered how hard it was for a small animation house to sell cartoons to giant broadcasters.

“Neither of us knew anything about this particular industry when we started,” Rezaei says. “We thought if we brought a great idea to a TV station they would love us.

“It couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s very competitive and very difficult to secure funding.”

Their solution was to launch Oznoz.com, their own distribution arm that makes available Big Bad Boo content and foreign language versions of shows such as Sesame Street.

Today, Rezaei and Jetha split their year between Vancouver and New York, making B.C. their base when production ramps up.

They’re currently in pre-production on their third season of 1001 Nights, their most successful show so far. Last year, they produced five 1001 Nights comic books, which have sold about 200,000 copies in five languages of the Middle East.

Her parents have embraced the career choice of a daughter who’s neither a doctor nor engineer. But they do have high expectations.

Rezaei’s father used to read Scheherazade’s tales from 1001 Nights to her as a child. When she told him two years ago they were going to animate the book, he paused before responding.

“‘You are lifting a very heavy rock,” he said.

“He essentially meant this is a big job and you better do Scheherazade justice,” she says. “I think we have.”

Company Profile

Big Bad Boo Studios, a Vancouver-based animation company, is owned and run by the husband-wife team of Aly Jetha and Shabnam Rezaei. Shabnam grew up in Tehran and Vienna; Jetha was raised in Burnaby, graduating with a degree in international relations from University of B.C.

The pair had been having their animation done in the Philippines but switched to Vancouver in 2007 after discovering the Lower Mainland’s talent pool on a family visit.

Annual revenues are about $10 million a year.

It has a skeleton staff of 12 that grows to 80 people when it ramps up seasonal production. At peak employment, Big Bad Boo also draws on 40 more people from outside the company.

Cartoon production is an expensive business: It costs up to $8 million to produce 52, 11-minute episodes of 1001 Nights.

Big Bad Boo’s productions so far include the cartoons 1001 Nights, Mixed Nutz, and Barak and Friends — A First Norooz, a Persian New Year holiday special.

Mixed Nutz airs on channels such as PBS, Shaw and Gem TV Middle East.

Two other series, Gone Bananas and Astra’s World, are in development.

Big Bad Boo is in the midst of pre-production on 1001 Nights, its most successful property to date. The award-winning show airs on channels Teletoon, Disney Asia and al Jazeera Children’s, among others.

The company is hoping to close a contract with Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Iran’s state broadcaster, that would see the series aired in Iran.

Oznoz.com, the company’s online distribution channel, has launched about original properties in 12 languages from producers around the world such as Sesame Street and Franny’s Feet. It hopes to boost that to about 300 properties this year.

As well as winning three Leo awards last year for 1001 Nights, Big Bad Boo received a B.C. export award for digital media and entertainment in 2012.

© Copyright (c) The Province

Original Article: http://www.bigbadboo.ca/index.php/newsdetail/nid/131/Vancouver%E2%80%99sBigBadBooStudiosearningworldwidereputationformulticulturalcartoons

What is inspirational leadership exactly? Creating value, building coalitions, solving problems and elevating humanity? Yes, all of that and more. No matter which decade we find ourselves in, the concept of leadership, and what it means to our lives, endures and always seems to produce a provocative and lively discussion.

Is it just about position or power, and is it just relegated to a particular field? The three writers on this post answer a resounding no to these questions. In fact, Ralph Lauren’s description is very much in line with our view. We agree that “a leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved” and consistently “inspires the power and energy to get it done.” So very true.

In social media, we see people — entrepreneurs, activists, disruptive thinkers, politicians, educators, journalists — with content that is informational, inspirational, even aspirational. The words of Lolly Daskal come to mind: “knowledge gives power, wisdom provides direction, ambition is the spark and courage removes obstacles”. Like when Micah Baldwin created Follow Friday in 2009 and Chris Messina pitched hashtags to the online community in 2007. Two men who made history with contributions that would help to elevate twitter engagement to new heights.

And we believe this also applies to the dynamic men and women profiled in this post. They represent a broad range of areas and disciplines, and come from all over the globe. Civilization is at its best when we work together. Everyone matters. Every person. Every country. So we selected a group of individuals heavily invested in this belief, with a record of leading by example and laying the foundation for our collective greatness. Impressive in every way. Enjoy!

Shabnam Rezaei – @ShabnamRezaei

Rezaei is co-founder of Big Bad Boo Studios, a production and distribution company dedicated to teaching children about culture through entertainment and co-founder of Oznoz Entertainment, which distributes products to promote language learning, multicultural understanding, tolerance and diversity. Oznoz products can be found at http://www.oznoz.com

The Buzz: She is the co-creator of Mixed Nuts, a TV series that promotes diversity and multiculturism through a group of friends from Iran, Korea, Cuba, Austria, and India, which airs on PBS among other channels. The series was a continuation of Babak and Friends – A First Norooz, which includes the voice talents of oscar-nominee, Shoreh Aghdashloo, Parviz Sayyad, Ali Pourtash and Catherine Bell. She created the 1001 Nights TV Series, which airs on Teletoon, Disney, CBC Radio-Canada and other channels

Since then her delectable desserts have become a staple in the wholesale and mail order markets. The
business she began on a single brownie recipe now boasts numerous varieties and flavors of gourmet brownies, cookies and dessert bars, further complimented by low fat, fat
free and sugar free versions.

Having won numerous industry awards throughout her career,
Uslander says the day her low fat brownies were named “best brownies” by Weight Watchers Magazine in
2002, the phone lines, “Lit up. We’d been written up before,” she remembers, “but the following of Weight
Watchers was amazing!” Last year, Silverland was also acclaimed as “one of the top 10 mail order
desserts” by the Fine Living Channel and the Food Network.

We first met Athena at the Food Marketing Institute Show last May.

What initially peaked our interest in Silverland was their preservative free health bar line, but what ultimately hooked us was Uslander’s genuine charm and passion for her craft. She is a petite pistol in the
giant world of food manufacturing who started out as an engineer designing bridges but ended up creating “a serious chocolate sensation” as a single mother of three against
all odds.

CWM: When did you come to the United States?

AU: I came over at 17, almost 18. At that time, Tehran was the Paris of the Middle East, very metropolitan.
CWM: What made your family come over?
AU: They didn’t, I was the only one.
CWM: At such a young age, by yourself ? What made you do that?
AU: I watched Armstrong walk on the moon. I remember watching our English television station and I didn’t understand a word, but was listening to the television announcer speaking and I thought to myself,
‘God, if I could one day speak like that, one day understand that.’ At the time I didn’t think I’d be able to.
But little by little I put it in my mom’s ear. She tried her best to keep me there, but I told her, ‘All I want to
do is go to the United States’. And so she helped me get here on the promise that I would support myself once I was settled.

I didn’t know anybody when I got here except for one person who lived in Chicago. I barely spoke any
English, it was hard at first. I remember going to Marshall Field’s the first day I was here and asking a
lady where the ‘toilet’ was. At first she couldn’t understand me and then after repeating it about six times she said, “The Powder Room is…”.

My friend got me an application for SIU. So that’s where I started out. I was in Chicago for two days and
then I went to Carbondale.
CWM: What year was that?
AU: 1973.
CWM: And then you ended up at Southern, of all places.
AU:I thought it was the best place in the world. I wasn’t looking
at Carbondale like a party school, with all the stigmas you have. My
roommate was from Boston and I was just eating it up. I remember
going to McDonalds one time…someone bet me that I couldn’t go in and
order a Big Mac and fries with them
understanding me on the first try. I
practiced and I practiced to do it
right, the bet was for $10, and I did it
– I was so proud of myself.
CWM: How difficult was it to
come over to a foreign country and
immediately go to school there?
AU:I was ESL, English as a
Second Language, and I did that for
one semester. But the thing about
engineering is, it’s a scientific language, so you don’t have to read a lot
of philosophy. We had to deal with
formulas and I was way over qualified for like the first three semesters,
because I had so much calculus,
chemistry and math already. So I
tested out of a lot of it. I got my
undergrad and master’s from SIU.
Then I returned to Chicago and married a guy who went to Penn that I
had met while he was visiting
friends at Southern. He was an
architect.
My first job was with a company
who did consulting with the State of
Illinois for bridge construction and
that’s what I did, designed bridges. It
was 1979 and the company was all
men, except for the receptionist. And
I was who I am now, so I walked in
and said [sprightly], “Hi—iiiii!” They
all looked at me like I was crazy, like
I was from Venus or something.
People wouldn’t talk, they had
breaks, and that’s when they would
talk. You had to be there and be real
quiet at your drafting boards. So I
was this little person sitting at this
big drafting board and if I’d turn
around and say something they’d
roll their eyes. Little by little, I knew
this was not where I wanted to be.
And with respect to the creative side,
it only goes for so long; I mean how
many state bridges do you see that
are much different than the rest?
How many bridges are there that are
actually unique and very beautiful
design wise?
CWM: How then did you make
the leap then from bridges to baking?
AU: One of the things that happened during this time was that my
company sent me to Springfield on a
project with this other woman they
had just hired so we could room
together. She was Indian and I realized she came from the same philosophy – that you’re born with engineer’s genes that you must be very
steadfast etc. I wasn’t like that. I just
didn’t think it would be for me more
than a few years, because once you
got it, it’s the same thing all over
again. I would come home on the
weekends and cry. I wanted to be
free, not because I was lazy or that I
didn’t want to work – it was never
that. I also had to take my PE
license, (Professional Engineer),
because without that you are like a
CPA without a certificate. So I took
that exam and passed it. Once I did
that I felt I could always go back to it
if I wanted to. That’s when I started
looking…
There was this woman who would
come to our parties and always bring
these brownies and people would
just them – they’d go nuts over them.
And I was always a chocoholic. She
had asked me several times if I’d
ever be interested in going into business with her, her name is Lisa
Silverman.
One day when I was desperate, (I
had quit engineering and was pregnant with my first child), I called her
and asked if she was still interested
in going into business together. And
she said she was.
At that time Lisa had just gotten
busted for baking at home. She was
making her brownies in her apartment in the DePaul area and one of
the jealous neighbors who had seen
her walking up the stairs with bags
and bags of chocolate, sugar and
flour, called the health department.
CWM: The timing was perfect!
AU: Yes! So I looked around for a
place and found a very small space
near Harlem and Grand. And we
started there with a convection oven,
a cutting table, a home freezer, a
cash register and $7,500. I remember
these little old Italian ladies would
walk by and come in and say, “What
are you girls doing?” We’d tell them,
‘We make brownies, would you like
some brownies?’ They’d say,
“WHAT!?” At the time it was 1983;
there really weren’t any brownies
around, except for Rachel’s
Brownies. It was the only brownie
around that was sold commercially
and even cookies, weren’t a trend
then. They weren’t something you
bought in a store; you made those
things at home, especially in
Elmwood Park, Illinois.
Later that same year, I gave birth
to my first child in August and then
Lisa’s husband got transferred to
San Francisco. I ended up buying
her out.
CWM: And she just let go of her
recipe?
AU: Yes, but you have to realize
that it was just one brownie at that
time. It was our basic double chocolate brownie.