WITH A PRODUCTION BUDGET exceeding €100.000 per episode, the brand new pre-school property City of Friends is Norway's most lavish children's television production ever. The CG animated series features a unique combination of anthropomorphised vehicles and animals happily living together and interacting with human characters in the City of Friends. The series has already been sold into TV channels in Scandinavia and Finland for a 2010 launch and sales into other territories are underway through Parthenon Kids. City of Friends will also be distributed on DVD in the Nordic region through Walt Disney Home Entertainment.

© CreaCon Entertainment AS / Carl Christian Hamre

City of Friends is originally created by Carl Christian Hamre, a policeman who in 2006 wrote three children's stories featuring a fire engine, a police car and an ambulance. His wife, Anne Stray Hamre, did all the drawings for the books, and the response of the children encouraged the development of a pilot for a television series. In cooperation with an internationally experienced creative consulting and production staff previously working with companies such as HIT/Bob the Builder and the BBC, City of Friends has then been further developed into a CG animated television series of 26 x 10 minutes. The series is preliminary planned for television and DVD launch in the Nordic countries in 2010. Sales to other territories are underway.

Main target group for City of Friends is children 2-6. The series is the biggest children's television project ever in Norway, with a budget exceeding one million NOK (approx. 100 000 euro) per episode. The series is inspired by children's fascination with vehicles and features anthropomorphic fire engines, ambulances and police cars as well as human and animal characters living happily together in the City of Friends. Cooperation, friendship, tolerance, knowledge, activity and fun are key values in the series!

A City of Friends entertainment park is already set for construction outside of the city of Bergen, preliminary planned to open in 2011-12.