Heather Conkie and Jana Sinyor Connect with Dark Oracle

An experienced screenwriter and a rookie team up to create a magical world for kids who don’t fit in.

By Dimetre Alexiou

A soft breeze blows over a desk, rustling the pages of a comic book. Curious, a young girl picks it up, opening to a page where a girl finds a love note stuffed in her locker, prompting a comment from a fellow student. Holding the comic in stunned silence, the girl tries to figure out how something that happened to her a just few hours before, has ended up word for word in this comic book.

So began the saga known as Dark Oracle, now in its second season on YTV. Created by Jana Sinyor and veteran television writer Heather Conkie, the series depicts four teenagers who have trouble fitting in at school, especially now that a mysterious, precognitive comic book is turning their lives upside down. Sinyor and Conkie could not be happier with the response the show has received–not only the 2005 International Emmy Award for Outstanding Series for Children and Young People, but the positive feedback from fans.

“A lot of fringe kids feel that the show speaks to them,” Sinyor says. “It’s not a show about pretty girls and athletic boys. All the kids in our show are on the peripheral, and our show focuses on the freaks. With the possible exception of Cally.”

Viewers of Dark Oracle know that Cally (Paula Brancati) is the most “normal” member of the quartet struggling to deal with the comic’s ill effects. Her twin brother Lance (Alex House) does not relate to the school’s in-crowd, gravitating instead to his goth girlfriend Sage (Danielle Miller) and his social misfit long-time friend Dizzy (Jonathan Malen), who is cursed with a crush on Cally. The concept for the show had its genesis in Sinyor’s own high school experiences.

“In high school I spent a lot of time playing paintball and reading comics and hanging out with geeks,” recalls Sinyor. “I’m really interested in geek subculture and Sandman comics and computer games and paintball. It was a subculture in my high school. I wanted to write a show that was sort of about that world.” 

Pitching the show

Sinyor did all the right things to pursue her goal. She studied at the Canadian Film Centre (CFC), but found landing employment difficult due to a lack of experience. Out of desperation she began fleshing out her idea for Dark Oracle.

“I pitched the show all over Canada,” Sinyor says. “I’d gone to Banff. I pitched to a ton of production companies. I couldn’t get in to pitch to any broadcasters, because it’s very difficult to get them to meet with you if you have no experience. They all said it was a great idea, but all the production companies said no.”

Increasingly frustrated with her prospects, Sinyor decided to attend a Writers Guild of Canada function for Gemini nominees, where Heather Conkie, writer for such series as Road to Avonlea, Seventh Heaven and Amazon, was being honoured. Little did either of them know the lasting effect the evening would have on their careers–an evening that almost didn’t happen.

“I’ve never gone to one of these functions before,” Conkie admits. “Any of the times I’ve been nominated I’ve just passed on the social part of it. This time, for whatever reason, I went.”

Conkie, who has also been a mentor at the CFC, had talked with young writers who were experiencing the same predicament as Sinyor. In fact, she had heard these stories over and over and was prepared to do something in response.

“I decided I would take on young people who couldn’t get through the door, whereas at that point I could,” she says. “I would help them with that. The down side of that was if I got them through the door they were stuck with me. Jana came up to me and said, ‘I have something. Can I send it to you?’ And she did. And unlike a lot of the other people that say they’ll keep in touch, Jana really did keep in touch. She drove me crazy for two or three weeks.”

Creating the whole package

“When I hooked up with Heather what started to come together was the whole package,” Sinyor remembers. “Now it was new inexperienced writer with very experienced writer. Suddenly it’s a lot more attractive. Then you get two broadcasters interested and it’s even more attractive. It sort of grows outward like that to the point where it’s very attractive to a production company. Me with my good idea and my year of experience alone is not going to get anybody jumping up on their feet.”

Together, Sinyor and Conkie crafted a show bible that reflected Dark Oracle’s dynamic visual style–an innovative blend of live action, animation and vibrant graphics. The next step, as suggested by Conkie, was pitching the show to broadcasters.

“If you have a broadcaster on board, first of all it gives you a better chance of having a little creative control,” Conkie says. “Second of all, you’ll have a pick of production companies the broadcaster would like to work with. It worked really well for us, because we took it to CBC first, and we took it to YTV, and they both said yes.”

Because Bonita Siegel, Director of Original Productions for Children’s Television at Corus Entertainment showed a remarkable understanding of the project, Sinyor and Conkie decided to go with YTV.

“It took about five seconds for me to say I like the show,” Siegel says. “It was imaginative. It was innovative. It was a no-brainer.”

When Dark Oracle met with similar enthusiasm at Shaftesbury Films, all the pieces were in place. However, because the show was now airing on YTV, some adjustments had to be made.

“We made it a little bit younger than we originally intended,” Sinyor explains. “Originally it was much older and darker. It still took place in a school, but it had a little more of an authentic feel. When I say that I mean that the kids were behaving in a very age-appropriate way. There was a gay teacher at the school. There were issues around sexuality that were brought more into the show.

“So because the show was on YTV and because they have their standards and practices, we had to adjust the show to fit that. We were going to do a dark sophisticated Buffy-type show that was a little bit younger, but we ended up going way younger.”

The end result is a show that reaches above YTV’s target demographic of six to 11 year-olds, and appeals to both boys and girls equally. The girls tune in for the relationships, and the boys tune in for the comics and gaming and the mild horror aspect.

“Dark Oracle is a little bit older,” Siegel says. “Its target is nine to 14, so it’s great for keeping the kids growing with the channel. It also engages viewers, because it requires some thinking to figure it out. It doesn’t just serve it up.”

Looking into Dark Oracle’s future

When they sat down to speak with Canadian Screenwriter, Sinyor and Conkie were uncertain if the funding was in place to guarantee a third season of Dark Oracle. Siegal was still waiting to see if YTV’s Canadian Television Fund envelope was going to be enough to keep one of her favourite projects afloat.

“It’s hard to get a show funded here,” Conkie says. “Even with broadcast support and even with a good production company, it’s still incredibly difficult to put the pieces of the pie together. Even getting the second season was incredibly difficult. Even with the Emmy, getting the third season, at present, is very difficult. We don’t know if we’re going to have a third or not. It’s totally up in the air.”

Nevertheless, the pair is hard at work developing an hour-long prime-time fantasy series. (They already have an interested broadcaster.) Conkie is also developing an idea for a program where she would guide six people through developing an idea, packaging the idea, going from outline to draft, all the way to meeting with a broadcaster in a three-month period.

“I think you need someone as your champion if you don’t have something on your résumé to show these people that you’re serious about doing it,” Conkie says. “A lot of people don’t know how to get their ideas down on paper the way a broadcaster wants to see it. They want to see that you’ve really thought about it.”