Three projects: Signs Magazine, fairy tales cartoons, mission archives
This was November 2003. A few months later, in April 2004, the SIGNIS Board met in Strasbourg. Again, the opportunity of that SIGNIS meeting was taken to invite the TV/Producers to join Strasbourg for the second seminar. The programme included a visit to the studios of Arte, the European public-service cultural television channel established in cooperation between France and Germany.
Most of the participants present in Cape Town came to Strasbourg, joined this time by representatives from Belgium, the two Catholic television institutions of France (Le Jour du Seigneur and KTO), Rome Reports (the news agency based in Rome), Sat2000, Télé Lumière from Lebanon, Blagovest Media, active in Russia, TV Seculo 21 from Brazil and the Paso Alto Group from Spain. Some twenty five institutions were represented at the TV/Producers' seminar in Strasbourg.
Again, the programme offered the possibility to each participant to present their institution and to show samples of programmes and productions.
Apart from efforts to promote the programmes of all institutions, three concrete projects were chosen. One was to coproduce a television magazine called 'SIGNS'. Peter Thomas, with the support of Sat2000 was in charge of preparing a pilot programme. A second one was to present, for funding by the European Community, a series of animated films about traditional fairy tales belonging to the European cultural heritage. Three institutions promised to collaborate in that project: Imago from the Czech Republic, Studio Malembe Maa (Congo - Belgium) and Paso Alto (Barcelona).The third project was to collect pictures and films made by missionaries since the early times of photography and film, to digitalize that material and to offer it as archives at the Catholic television stations and producers. Two institutions were involved in the project: Telecre (Belgium) and Nova-T (Italy).
Msgr Enrique Planas, the delegate of the Pontifical Council for social communications, also representative of the Vatican Film Library, who was present for half a day, indicated how much he appreciated the initiative taken by SIGNIS to organize such seminars for the leaders of Catholic television.
The delegate of Imago invited the participants to come to Prague for the next seminar, scheduled for April 2005. He offered a visit to the famous puppet studio where Jiri Trnka made all his films and where Imago, with the support of Le Jour du Seigneur was producing a series of films under the title : 'The Time of the Foundations', describing the three religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
