Entertainment and sports lawyer Carla Parris founded The Business of Carnival (BOC) four years ago, as the first web-series of its kind globally.
Her intention of educating viewers on the legal and business side of the industry in a novel way saw her launching it on YouTube and Parris is excited to announce that it will be available for international viewing on all Roku devices and platforms across the US, UK and Canada.
Roku is an international streaming platform where viewers can enjoy a wide range of content and operates much like other popular streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu.
It gathers over 56 million monthly viewers in the US alone and will further expose the world and the Caribbean diaspora to major contributors in the Carnival industry while shedding light on its ins and outs.
Parris said the BOC team is excited by the possibilities ahead and briefly chronicled the show’s growth over the past four years.
[caption id="attachment_940643" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Carla Parris with season four guest Jerome ‘Rome’ Precilla. -[/caption]
“This show started off as a passion project, born out of my realisation that education was sorely needed in the entertainment industry. It was just supposed to be this fun creative project that I created with the spirit of service, to address a serious knowledge gap in the market. It was never meant initially to be a business product.”
Parris said when she pitched the concept to a few local TV stations and got no feedback, her sister encouraged her to try filming on her own.
“Since we had no budgets for locations, the first two seasons were filmed in my Uncle and Aunt’s living room and we turned the place upside down for two days turning into a home-grown film set. As much as I enjoyed the process of independent filmmaking, the reality is that this has also been a severe financial strain.”
When she realised the large interest in the content after the first year, she determined the show could gather greater following and could make a wider educational impact as business product.
“We began the process of seeking brand partners. This journey was extremely stressful and strenuous as we are still largely a country where companies understand partnerships with brick and mortar companies as opposed to those in the film and creative industries. I’m grateful to agencies like Tourism Trinidad, The Sanctuary Day Spa and Paul Mitchell out of LA whose partnership in a few seasons allowed us to offset some of the production costs. Over the past four years, the first three months of my life were dedicated purely to the production of the show, so I was not practising as much law as I had grown accustomed, I had to figure out really creative ways of balancing my time between the show and the practice and it was not an easy journey. This Roku deal therefore feels like years of financial sacrifice, belief in the vision have paid off.”
In season one, the team began the journey filming in TT and Barbados, which were aired on YouTube. In season two, they executed
