Bigger Picture Research

Australian audiovisual industry employment data

Screen Australia has added to its Get the Picture web site new statistics on employment in the audiovisual industries from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Census of Population and Housing, which make an interesting comparison with equivalent data collected in the UK by Skillset (e.g. the Survey of the Audio Visual Industries Workforce 2005).

The new data set provides a time-series from 1971 to 2006, with overviews by state, gender, qualification, country of birth, income and occupation. The audiovisual industries include film and video production and post-production services, film and video distribution, film exhibition, television broadcasting, video hire and other audiovisual categories.

Key findings, taken from the GTP web site, are as follows:

• There were 45,088 people employed in the audiovisual industries in Australia in 2006.
• Women make up 48 per cent of employees in audiovisual industries overall.
• Men are much more likely than women to earn an income in the highest bracket, and much less likely to earn an income in the lowest bracket.
• More than three-quarters of this workforce was located in three states: 42% in New South Wales, 24% in Victoria and 16% in Queensland.
• NSW has the highest number of employees in each of the audiovisual industries, including almost half of those in the film and video production and post-production services and television broadcasting industries, and 59 per cent of those in film and video distribution.
• Television broadcasting continues to be the largest audiovisual employer in all states and territories except Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia, where it has been overtaken by the video hire industry.
• Television broadcasting has the largest proportion of workers in the top income bracket (Aus $67,600 or more). Predictably, the industries with significant numbers of part-time workers – film exhibition and video hire – have the highest proportions of people in the lowest income bracket (less than Aus $20,800).
• The proportion of people in audiovisual industries with a Bachelor's degree or higher has steadily increased, from 16 per cent in 1996 to 24 per cent in 2006. About one in five people identified themselves as having other qualifications, while around half indicated they had no formal qualifications.
• The proportion of people of Australian origin in the audiovisual industries was above that of the overall Australian workforce. Eighty per cent of people working in audiovisual industries identified Australia as their country of birth, six per cent were from the United Kingdom and Ireland and four per cent from Asia.

Everything you always wanted to know about the film production workforce*

* But were afraid to ask.

Have you ever wondered who actually makes British films? Questions like how did they first get started in the business and what qualifications do they have? How much do they earn on average, and how do earnings compare across departments and job categories? How many projects do they work on in a year and what kind of contracts do they have? What training have they received and what do they need in future? And, of course, the big question: how diverse is the workforce in terms of age, gender, ethnicity and disability?

If you have wondered about any of these things then help is at hand: answers can be found in the Feature Film Production Workforce Survey Report 2008, published last week by Skillset, the Sector Skills Council for Creative Media (and co-funded with the UK Film Council).

The research, part of the regular programme of studies undertaken by Skillset, provides a uniquely detailed window onto film production working patterns and skills development in the UK. It deserves to be read widely.

(Before going further I have an interest to declare: I’m the report author [although I didn't conduct the actual research]. But don’t let that put you off).

Under developed: screenwriting research

Earlier this week Screen Daily posted news that the second ‘Brit List’ was doing the rounds in industry circles.

If you’re unfamiliar with the List (and most people will be, given its limited circulation) it ranks the most popular unproduced screenplays in the UK, compiled from a survey of 40 anonymous industry bods (producers, acquisitions executives, agents, sales agents and public funders).

It is intended ‘to echo the success of the US Black List in drawing attention and perhaps finance to these projects’, according to Screen Daily. ‘The Hollywood Black List is well-known for having identified and drawn attention to projects such as Juno and Lars And The Real Girl before they were produced.’

It may seem a cloak-and-dagger way of highlighting promising screenplays and their scribes, but it is in keeping with the shadowy world of feature film development. No one can say for certain how many scripts are currently ‘in development’ in the UK. Ditto the amount of money invested in development (in aggregate and on average per project), the average length of time a screenplay is developed, how many people are involved and who they are, and (perhaps most importantly) what proportion of screenplays make it into production. We know this last figure is low, but quite how small, and how it may have changed over time, is uncertain.

Risk management: Public investment in film

The title of this post, the last of four looking at some of the challenges facing the film business in the UK (as evidenced in the UK Film Council’s 2008 Statistical Yearbook) is a bit of a cheat. Or rather, it marks a change in direction from its predecessors. The previous posts have gone under the rubric of ‘risky business’ because the data reported highlight the chancy nature of film as a commercial enterprise. This final post presents evidence from the data record showing how those agencies charged with promoting and strengthening UK film culture spend public money to address those risks (and market failure more generally).

The figures presented are broad-brush, skipping over the minutiae of individual funding decisions and indicating, instead, the macro patterns of public expenditure.

Phew, Wot a Pie Chart!

Around this time of year you can expect a veritable frenzy of news media interest in film data, thanks to publication of the UK Film Council Statistical Yearbook. This year The Guardian leads the pack with a two-page, full colour spread of facts and figures (pictured), which probably means someone in the graphic design department fancied a break from drawing maps of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Times was somewhat more restrained, deciding instead to whip up debate about what constitutes a British movie (‘British blockbusters take on the world’). Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum? British? Apparently he was wearing union flag undies during the shoot, which grants bonus points under the cultural test (provided they are made in Birmingham and not Bangalore).

Equality in the film production sector

Today the government announced it is taking further action to tackle age discrimination and pay inequality between men and women. I'm not going to debate the merits or otherwise of Harriet Harman's proposals here, but needless to say some kind of action is long overdue in the film production sector, which has struggled to become more diverse and fairer despite a very welcome public pledge by industry leaders.