Beccs Champagne
Captured by François Mittins
Fermenting Ideas
In this talk, Beccs Champagne races a decade-long creative loop that moves through ambition, parenting, pitching, rejection, and the slow payoff of sticking with an idea long enough for it to evolve.
She starts in animation school and early industry work, where a ghost story comic idea called Ghost Circle lands in a Google Doc and sits untouched for years. While she builds a steady personal practice, she pushes for bigger opportunities and eventually lands on Hilda through an internal pitch initiative, a role that shapes her storytelling skills for seasons.
Then comes the hard pivot: she prepares for parenthood by taking on too much work, works through pregnancy, and returns to work exhausted, barely drawing. When a rare in-person pitch slot opens up, she grabs it on impulse and revives that old ghost idea, reshaping it into a TV pitch. The meeting goes well, the notes are thoughtful, and then the industry reality hits. They already have a ghost show. No.
Instead of dropping it, she keeps pushing. She makes a short film with a close collaborator, enters Pitch This, rewrites the deck at the last second, and wins. Suddenly everyone assumes she’s about to have a show. But winning a pitch competition is not the same as getting greenlit. She’s juggling studio work, two shifts of parenting, and a development landscape that wants certainty, polish, and safe bets. The project stalls. The pressure of “what now?” starts to warp her relationship with the idea.
A turning point arrives as practical advice: shop it for a year, then put it away. She does. More films get made. A second child arrives. And she rebuilds her personal practice around sustainability: no unpaid computer work, projects that can be picked up and put down, and a simple filter at the start of everything: “Is this an experience I want to have?”
She closes with the core message. Ideas don’t rot. They ferment. The work keeps evolving in the background while you live your life, and you can return to it when the time is right.
@beccschampagne
rebeccachampagnefolio.com
