“Some of them does talk the thing,

But I come out here to walk it”

So sings Er­phaan Alves in his 2020 song So­ca Glob­al where he men­tions the heights he hopes to take the genre in­clud­ing to Broad­way and the Bill­board charts.

Well So­ca and oth­er as­pects of Car­ni­val may get mil­lions of eyes on it as The Busi­ness of Car­ni­val se­ries which high­lights the le­gal and busi­ness as­pects of Caribbean en­ter­tain­ment and Car­ni­vals has been picked up by the Roku Chan­nel.

“As the first and on­ly web se­ries of its kind, which speaks to the le­gal and busi­ness as­pects of the car­ni­val in­dus­try in the Caribbean, we are proud to have land­ed this dis­tri­b­u­tion deal which al­lows the sto­ries and brands of 19 of our Caribbean car­ni­val en­tre­pre­neurs and celebri­ties based in T&T, Bar­ba­dos and Los An­ge­les, Hol­ly­wood to be show­cased to Roku’s au­di­ences of over 56 mil­lion house­holds,” Car­la Par­ris stat­ed.

“I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py that the deal was fi­nalised now, dur­ing this Car­ni­val sea­son when many of our cre­atives and en­tre­pre­neurs are not able to earn in the ways that they have be­come ac­cus­tomed as a re­sult of the pan­dem­ic abridged ver­sion of Car­ni­val. This ex­po­sure has the po­ten­tial to pro­vide co­gent busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties for the en­tre­pre­neurs fea­tured to ply their trades in for­eign mar­kets where car­ni­vals and sim­i­lar type fes­ti­vals are held,” she said.

Par­ris said her hope is al­so that it will give those in for­eign mar­kets, fur­ther in­sight in­to the busi­ness and le­gal as­pects of how our mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar in­dus­try works and will not on­ly in­vite more vis­i­tors but al­so busi­ness in­vestors to the re­gion.

“I am in­cred­i­bly grate­ful to my fam­i­ly, friends, brand part­ners and pro­duc­tion crew who stuck with me all these years and kept en­cour­ag­ing me to pur­sue the se­ries. Pro­duc­ing and host­ing this se­ries to­geth­er with my team for the past four years has been a bag of mixed emo­tions, full of many mo­ments of ex­treme highs and re­al­ly low lows. On the one hand, the de­ci­sion to in­de­pen­dent­ly pro­duce the se­ries has al­lowed me for at least three months of the year (De­cem­ber, Jan­u­ary, Feb­ru­ary) to ful­ly em­brace my cre­ativ­i­ty and to in­fuse my love for sto­ry­telling and broad­cast me­dia with ed­u­ca­tion but, on the oth­er hand, con­vert­ing this se­ries which start­ed as a pas­sion project in­to a mon­e­ti­z­able prod­uct was ex­treme­ly chal­leng­ing,” Par­ris said.

Par­ris said in our mar­ket, it can be re­al­ly dif­fi­cult to sell the idea of a non-tra­di­tion­al in­tan­gi­ble prod­uct.

“We are ac­cus­tomed to con­ven­tion­al brick-and-mor­tar busi­ness­es where per­sons sell phys­i­cal prod­ucts, so when I ap­proached po­ten­tial brand part­ners over the years with the idea of sell­ing prod­uct place­ments and lo­go place­ments in­to a web se­ries which aired on You Tube with as­so­ci­at­ed short form con­tent on Face­book and In­sta­gram it proved to be a for­eign con­cept to many. They were not will­ing to in­vest in what was then a nov­el idea. The irony is that now that we are in a pan­dem­ic and busi­ness­es are forced to in­no­vate, some of those very busi­ness­es now have their own so­cial me­dia-based se­ries as a means of ex­plain­ing their prod­ucts and ser­vices,” she said.

“There­fore, to have lived to see the day, where a glob­al stream­ing plat­form ex­pressed that they not on­ly loved the qual­i­ty of our pro­duc­tion but un­der­stood the con­cept of an ed­u­ca­tion­al talk se­ries which po­si­tions our Caribbean cre­atives as busi­nessper­sons with in­vestible com­modi­ties, plus of­fer­ing a rev­enue gen­er­at­ing li­cens­ing deal, felt like a dream come true. I’ve al­ways dreamed about play­ing a role in hav­ing our Caribbean voic­es heard glob­al­ly,” Par­ris said.

Par­ris said she is es­pe­cial­ly proud of the fact that the core crew in­clu­sive of her sis­ter Lyn­merie Par­ris, di­rec­tor, hair­dress­er, make­up artist and the var­i­ous videog­ra­phy pro­duc­ers are all Trinida­di­an.

The theme song was al­so pro­duced lo­cal­ly.

“It was al­so re­al­ly im­por­tant to me, to be styled by lo­cal and Caribbean de­sign­ers, thus all of the fash­ion on each sea­son of the show was sourced from lo­cal fash­ion hous­es and de­sign­ers. So of­ten, we are con­di­tioned to be­lieve that we have to go abroad in or­der to suc­ceed and to cre­ate qual­i­ty film pro­duc­tions. My hope is that our suc­cess dis­pels some of these no­tions,” she said.

“Aris­ing out of all of this ex­pe­ri­ence that I’ve gained, I would love to host oth­er TV shows, to mod­er­ate pan­els on en­tre­pre­neur­ship, brand de­vel­op­ment and mo­ti­va­tion­al speak­ing. On the le­gal side, my ide­al role would be work­ing close­ly with Caribbean tourism agen­cies to as­sist in de­vel­op­ing strong na­tion­al brands and with tal­ent man­age­ment agen­cies who are de­vel­op­ing tal­ent for glob­al mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion,” she said.

Par­ris al­so gave her thought on the abridged ver­sion of Car­ni­val ex­pect­ed to be held here.

“While I un­der­stand the lim­i­ta­tions of the gov­ern­ment and the im­por­tance of putting the health of the na­tion first giv­en that we are in a pan­dem­ic, we have to bal­ance this with the need to move for­ward in a way that but­tress­es the eco­nom­ic growth of all of the var­i­ous arms of car­ni­val stake­hold­ers,” she said.

“The pan­dem­ic has taught us that tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tions will now form part of our day to day norms. Last year, many of us in the en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­try took part in an ex­per­i­men­tal lab where event pro­duc­ers, cos­tume de­sign­ers were paired with soft­ware de­vel­op­ers to cre­ate pro­to­types for 3D car­ni­val events. I would have loved to have seen at­tempts made to pro­duce hy­brid events in which there are live el­e­ments for per­form­ing artistes but al­so in­fus­ing ex­cit­ing tech­nolo­gies such as vir­tu­al re­al­i­ty and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in­to the car­ni­val ex­pe­ri­ence,” Par­ris said.

Par­ris said in this way, not on­ly would this coun­try be pro­duc­ing events which sat­is­fy our core need for ac­tive en­gage­ment but al­so pro­pelling the brand of T&T’s Car­ni­val in­to one where next-gen­er­a­tion vir­tu­al worlds are ex­plored wide­ly.

“There­fore, many of our cre­atives would earn rev­enue through In­tel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty via the li­cens­ing of So­ca mu­sic, pho­tog­ra­phy and oth­er cre­ative el­e­ments in these on­line events,” she said.

She said this would al­so have a down­stream ef­fect on our econ­o­my as lo­cal an­i­ma­tors, soft­ware de­vel­op­ers and graph­ic artists would al­so be hired to col­lab­o­rate on these projects.

“I find it very in­ter­est­ing that St Vin­cent & The Grenadines has an­nounced that they may be con­sid­er­ing a Meta Verse Car­ni­val. A Meta Verse car­ni­val may be one where users can in­ter­act, game and ex­pe­ri­ence things as they would in the re­al-world events. I am pay­ing close at­ten­tion as to how that de­vel­ops since there are many In­tel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty con­sid­er­a­tions that will need to be ad­dressed,” she said.