A New West production company is in the early stages of developing a TV series about stress.
Earlier this summer, SOMA Television Ltd. was awarded $90,000 by Telus. The fund was part of a $2 million pie divided among 14 organizations tasked with creating engaging multimedia content that inspires healthy living.
"We did a series about stress a while back and talked to medical practitioners, asking what is the most important thing about this topic," said co-owner Deepak Sahasrabudhe. "The message we got is to tell people they're under stress, where it's coming from and how to deal with it."
And that's exactly what the upcoming series plans to do, but with a twist.
Sahasrabudhe and partner Susan Millar are hoping to create an app and some website content to complement the program.
"Imagine watching a TV show and making it personal. The app will have an interactive questionnaire that you answer as you watch," he said. "At the end, you press a button and you get a stress assessment that you can take to your doctor."
"A lot of people don't know how stress affects them. They may not know it affects your ability to remember things, or that it causes aches and pains," said Millar.
According to Sahasrabudhe, the questions would be similar to what a doctor would ask a patient.
Many aspects of the project are still up in the air, including the show's format and choice of broadcaster.
"Maybe it'll be one episode and a whole lot more web content, or maybe 13 TV shows. We could take a documentary approach, it could be a talk-show approach, we just don't know yet," Millar said. "The earliest we would go to air is fall of 2015."
Sahasrabudhe said the challenge is making the series successful given "medical programming isn't something you see much on television."
"There are of course certain afternoon shows where doctors give medical advice, but would we fit there, or would be better at a different time slot with a different strategy?" he said.
Millar added the idea of syndicating the project to individual broadcasters like Victoria's Chek TV has also been suggested.
SOMA has produced 22 television documentary series, more than a 100 programs and has won over 60 international awards. The pair is also known for using new approaches in their work. In the series, Set Your Sails, produced in the mid-'80s, viewers had a seat in the cockpit of large sailboats thanks to the BetaCam, the first mobile video camera.
"I think part of the reason we were able to get funding from Telus is because they felt pretty confident we know the realm of broadcasting," Sahasrabudhe said.
