Bigger Picture Research

Film Policy Review 2012: Some initial thoughts

The Film Policy Review Panel, chaired by Lord Smith, finally reported today.

It’s impossible in a blog post to give a balanced assessment of every one of the Panel’s 56 recommendations, so what follows is a selection of first impressions.

This is a companion piece to a guest post on BOP Consulting’s blog,  published here. 

 1. Much is familiar in the Panel’s report from earlier public policy statements. It’s possible, as I’ve done here, to cross-reference the Panel’s recommendations with those of the 1998 Film Policy Review Group and subsequent action taken by film bodies including the UK Film Council.

In so doing it's apparent that the latest Review builds on a great deal of what has gone before. As far as I can see, fewer than a dozen of the Panel’s recommendations lack any antecedent. Leaving aside the presentational shift placing audiences at the heart of film policy, this is very much an evolution and not a revolution in approach.

2. Community cinema (big screen programming run by volunteers for the local community not profit) has long been under-valued by public film bodies, despite the obvious potential for audience development at a local level. So it’s gratifying to see the Panel advocating financial support for ‘clusters of local cinemas and film societies across the Nations and Regions of the UK’ (recommendation 3) and ‘local film clubs and societies in areas of rural deprivation or isolation’ (recommendation 5).

3. Film education bodies proliferated under the UK Film Council, so their consolidation (recommendation 7) is something of a reversal. But more important than who delivers support on the ground is the question of the Department for Education’s ongoing commitment to film education in England, and the status of moving image learning within the National Curriculum. The Panel worries DfE support might be in jeopardy, yet without it there really is little future for ‘a new unified offer for film education’.

4. The Panel has not totally resisted the temptations of gimmickry and faddism. Of the former, the idea of a British film brand makes sense when coordinating overseas sales, but on home turf a ‘British film week’ (recommendation 2) could backfire if the flow of branded product is anything less than first class. And the idea that a strategy is needed to set out how film can ‘enhance social cohesion’ (recommendation 4) is unconvincing without more concrete evidence of need and benefit.

5. There’s little to quibble over in the Panel’s recommendations for development, production and distribution funding. Re-aligning the interests of producers and distributors through joint ventures, continuation of the Vision Awards for development, recycling recoupment of public funding for future filmmaking by successful producers, and rewarding key creatives with a recoupment share all seem sensible measures in pursuit of quality and to help build longer-term capacity in the independent sector. 

6. Less convincing is the Panel’s prescription for reversing the ‘long history of failure to connect policies for the film and television sectors.’ The Panel proposes establishing Memoranda of Understanding with all the major broadcasters, but the only precedent, a memorandum signed by UKFC and BBC in 2006, was largely unsuccessful. And that’s despite the BBC’s sympathy for the cause, unlike BSkyB whose support for independent British film is risible.

In fairness the Panel does acknowledge this, recommending ‘legislative solutions’ as a backstop (recommendation 32), and we can only hope the threat is taken seriously. (The Panel’s proposed review of the UK film acquisitions market is long-overdue [recommendation 33], and the findings could prove critical during MOU negotiations).

7. In total the Panel recommends development of no fewer than six new strategies (UK-Wide film network; film and social cohesion; international sales; co-production; talent in the regions; and private investment strategies), alongside reworking several already in existence.

That’s an awful lot of work for the BFI and its partners, and some careful scheduling will be required. Sensibly the Panel has not prescribed an action plan (unlike the 1998 Film Policy Review Group, whose plan slipped almost immediately). Nonetheless, some sense of the relative priority of the Panel’s proposals would have been helpful.

8. The Panel deserves credit for considering the role of hard evidence in policymaking and in assessing the performance of public film bodies. The section on ‘Research and Knowledge’, built on a recommendation (number 53) to strengthen the BFI’s research function with an expanded remit and, importantly, sufficient resources, is very welcome (as any regular reader of this blog will appreciate).

The report calls for a 'radically new approach [...] to collecting and making available information, particularly in the wake of the Government's commitment to open data'. Quite right. Meanwhile, the proposal to review film policy and the BFI’s performance every three years is also welcome (recommendation 56). Regular independent review should help keep the policy cycle fresh and guard against complacency.

I’ve not touched on any of the recommendations around exhibition, skills, exports or film heritage, but there are plenty of good ideas to back up the Panel’s aspirations in these areas. Overall, I think the report deserves our close attention and look forward to the Government’s response.

Happy New Year, by the way.

Why Donna Anton gets my vote for BFI Governor

The election is underway to find David Thompson's successor as BFI Member Governor.

To quote the blurb, Governors are no less than “the guardians and shapers of Britain's moving image heritage and culture, as well as being responsible for awarding Lottery film funds and for the strategic direction of the Government's lead agency for film.”

Guardian, shaper and administrator: you need a special kind of person for this unpaid public office of poetry and prose.

It’s a testament to the BFI’s standing that it has attracted four excellent candidates on paper, including Watershed’s Head of Programme Mark Cosgrove, Professor Sylvia Harvey of the University of Leeds and BAFTA magnet Peter Kosminsky.

As impressive as these candidates are, my vote goes to Donna Anton. I’ve known Donna for several years now, first when she chaired the British Federation of Film Societies and latterly in her capacity as Director of the Cornwall Film Festival. Donna can guard and shape and administrate with the best of them, and she’s by far the most responsible person I know in West Cornwall.

But it’s not the fact of our acquaintance that secured my X in the box. When the election materials arrived in the post I was prepared to judge each candidate on the strength of their supporting statements.

It’s here that I feel Donna scores highest marks. She’s the only one to pitch her candidacy in terms of the needs and interests of the BFI membership. Hardly surprising given Donna’s film society background, with community action and volunteering at its core.

As importantly, I’m hoping audiences will feature at the heart of the next iteration of film policy (not producers, or distributors or any other sectoral interest group). The BFI is uniquely positioned to capitalise on this in a way the UK Film Council never was. If elected, Donna’s experience as festival director and film society volunteer in tune with non-metropolitan audiences will add further heft to a Board already well served by industry and academic voices. Somebody needs to speak up for members from a demand-side perspective, and that's why Donna gets my vote.

Voting, open to all BFI members and Sight & Sound subscribers, closes at noon on Tuesday 20 December. Full details here.

What do we need to know? Part 3: Means and ends

Much has changed since this series began. It was unclear at the time of the first post whether publicly funded film research of the kind undertaken by the UK Film Council had any real future. Now it seems there’s reason for hope.

I’ve been told research was one of the topics discussed at the first Ministerial Film Forum chaired by Ed Vaizey. Meanwhile, attendees at last Thursday’s BSAC Film Conference learned the UK Film Council Research & Statistics Unit (RSU) is transferring to the BFI. This is a welcome development, for all the reasons given by contributors to earlier posts.

More dispiriting is news there’s no money attached to the transfer, which means the BFI’s shrinking pot will have to be further eked out. Unfortunately, research is an expensive business. The last UK Film Council three-year plan earmarked £500k for the task, a figure that looks fancifully high now. To do a half-decent job you’d need a low six-figure sum annually…but even that looks like a stretch too far in the present circumstances.

Some sort of public-private partnership is being considered to address the shortfall, involving the BFI (and presumably other public bodies) and the principal trade associations (FDA, CEA, Pact and BVA). I understand discussions are already underway, but the main stumbling block is that trade bodies don’t have any money either. They do have access to data, although it’s not all their own. In a partnership every party has to bring something to the table, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that penury and good intentions are all that’s on offer in this instance. At least there’s common ground between the prospective partners.

But we are where we are, and there’s no point bemoaning the fact. In any case, I think there are two reasons for remaining positive.

First, the moment is right for a fundamental rethink of publicly funded, and industry sponsored, research activity. There’s an opportunity in this transitional moment to consider how best to utilise available resources and prioritise those areas of most pressing need.

It makes sense for the future direction of research activity to be considered in parallel with development of the next iteration of film policy. The forthcoming film policy review, flagged last Thursday by the Minister, will look at ‘improving the sustainability of the industry’. Research ought to feature prominently, not least in setting terms of reference for judging industry sustainability against agreed measures.

Furthermore, as contributors to previous posts have argued, UKFC has done much to be commended on the research front, but more is always needed to meet existing and future requirements.

Viewed from another angle, filmmaker Chris Atkins once described UKFC’s research output as ‘a running joke among friends’ in an article in The Times. This points to a breakdown in trust among certain sections of the industry that should be tackled directly, and now’s the time for the BFI to start afresh.

As expressed by contributors to earlier posts, top priorities include addressing the information asymmetry between the biggest companies and the smallest, promoting awareness of market trends and audience behaviour, and making accessible the types of data needed for investor-friendly business plans.

None of this will directly address the trust deficit Chris Atkins alludes to. That’s largely a presentational matter, and so I’d add to the list of priorities the need for greater care over the way research is mobilised in news stories about changing industry fortunes. The current practice of using statistics-heavy press releases to trumpet home grown successes misses a trick, as Arvind Ethan David described in last Friday’s FT (‘The King’s Speech and British Cinema’). Puff pieces may garner column inches in the red tops but nobody in the industry really buys into them. And given the UK Film Council’s premature demise, it seems this kind of cheerleading doesn’t always wash in Westminster either.

The second reason for optimism poses a more fundamental challenge to the established way of doing things, driven this time by developments in information technology. 

A recurring theme of previous posts is the desire for ready access to free (or low cost) data. This in turn requires greater openness on the part of public and private sector providers, and a willingness to do things differently. One possible solution is to strike a more appropriate balance between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in making data accessible.

The current model operated by UKFC is classic ‘push’: research reports and summary statistics are published at regular intervals or on an ad hoc basis during the year. In this scenario, the RSU acts as a gatekeeper, deciding how and when to release information based on its assessment of need and mindful of institutional factors (like communications planning). This approach enables the RSU to observe any restrictions placed on the publication of commercial data, and ensures information is quality checked and analysed in ways deemed most appropriate. Which is all well and good…

…But as several contributors have argued, users want access to more raw data (not just statistics) in readable formats so they can generate their own analyses.

Benefits of such an approach include:

• Increased transparency (summary statistics only direct the eye to where the analyst is pointing, and they can also mislead by omission. Here's a quote I never tire of: ‘Statistics’, A.E. Housman once noted, ‘are like a lamppost to a drunk: used more for support than illumination’);
• Greater relevance (open disclosure has the potential to serve a wider range of needs beyond those envisaged by gatekeepers);
• Harnessing all the talents (users can analyse, ‘mash’ and share data in any way they choose, bringing more minds to bear on the task);
• Encouraging user involvement (push= passive reception; pull= active engagement).

Some vestige of the push model may still be desirable, in the form of, for example, an annual summary of key indicators linked to the main struts of film policy, or a 'Yearbook lite'  that draws on RSU's expertise in presenting market overviews. Nonetheless, the default should surely be pull not push, as information technology suited to the task is already widely available. At the most basic level, a pull model can be operated much like the Guardian’s Data Store; all that’s needed is an online platform and a willing community of users.

There are challenges, and they should not be underestimated. For one thing, the RSU cannot unilaterally decide to make its data holdings freely available. It is bound by commercial licenses that impose strict conditions on disclosure to third parties.  And in the case of UK production data generated through UKFC tracking and certification records, the publication of individual film budgets is currently prohibited.

But this is where a public-private partnership approach could yield genuine benefits, by involving trade associations, public agencies and the main commercial data providers in a thoroughgoing conversation about how to liberate data for mutual gain. That really would be a radical development.

While we’re at it, let’s not confine this partnership approach to the UK. Existing networks have a role to play, notably the European Film Agency Research Network coordinated by the European Audiovisual Observatory, which brings together the research interests of public bodies across the continent. Europe is certainly a key market for UK film and television, as a paper authored by the Observatory for the BSAC conference makes clear (‘The Importance of the European Market for the UK Film and Television Industry’). But just as significant in the present context is the fact that European agencies face common data acquisition challenges. In the search for UK-based public-private solutions, there’s good reason to remain attentive to creative thinking wherever it hails from, and to collaborate across borders wherever the common good can be served.  

How to bring this series of posts to a close? We’ve covered such a wide terrain. Let’s follow up Housman’s quote with another inebriated fellow, who’s looking for his house keys under a lamppost. A policeman comes over to ask what he’s doing.

“I’m looking for my keys,” the drunk says. He points across the road: “I lost them over there”.

The policeman looks puzzled. “Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?”

“Well obviously,” the man slurs matter-of-factly, “because the light’s much better.”

This drunken encounter is a reminder that doing something for convenience, rather than because it’s the best course of action, can have certain logic; and that extends to film research provision. But there really is no point in simply going through the motions, especially when public money is at stake. In straitened times the temptation is to become fixated on means (or rather, the lack thereof), yet it’s ends that really count.

What do we need to know? Part 2: Academic and other contributions

 

“The global film industry is potentially able to provide a rich and fruitful research basket for those wishing in particular to straddle industrial practice with academic study.”
Angus Finney, The International Film Business: A Market Guide Beyond Hollywood

 

“Openness and transparency has the potential to transform government. It can strengthen people's trust in government and encourage greater public participation in decision-making.”
Cabinet Office web site, February 2011

 

“There is nothing a government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult.”
John Maynard Keynes

 

Industry practitioners are not the only ones with an interest in the fate of publicly funded film research activity. The audience for this output goes far wider, and includes academics and those involved at all levels in education, plus observers and commentators of every hue, of old media and new.

The contributors included below are drawn from different parts of this wider research constituency, though what they have to say covers much common ground and connects with many of the views expressed by industry contributors in the previous post.

In their joint contribution, Prof. Paul McDonald and Nigel Culkin (University of Portsmouth and University of Hertfordshire, respectively) unpack the question of what we need to know, to consider why such knowledge is necessary and how it can best be acquired and communicated for the common good.

One glaring omission in the existing data record they highlight is the absence of readily available information on the home entertainment market (DVD, Blu-ray and online platforms). Aside from aggregated data on the retail and rental markets (published by the British Video Association and reproduced in the UKFC Statistical Yearbook), title-by-title numbers are unavailable except to subscribers of commercial services (e.g. The Official Charts Company).

Yet as Paul and Nigel make clear, anyone seeking to understand the shape of the UK film market, and changing patterns of consumption over time, needs such information. (The UK is not alone in this; even in the US, where box office figures are ubiquitous and freely accessible, home entertainment data are restricted to subscription-based services).

In a related vein, Phil Wickham (The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture) sees quantitative film research as essential for broadening our understanding of the historical context within which films are made and consumed, as well as for holding the delivery of public policy to account (in the spirit of the Cabinet Office’s current transparency drive).

Turning to Paul and Nigel’s question of how such data should be made available, Phil makes the case for reinstating the BFI’s information service research function, drawing upon their expertise in analysing and interpreting data for different users, as in the days of the BFI Film and Television Handbook.

But as Nick Redfern points out, responsibility for making data readily available lies not only with public bodies. Nick argues forcefully that trade associations could do more to open up good quality data to the wider research community, and in so doing serve their members’ interests through wider promotion of sector-specific market intelligence.

David Steele draws on his experience as a former Head of Research and Statistics at the UK Film Council in sketching out the wider research constituency and its needs. He reminds us that government requires ready access to authoritative and timely data for its own internal purposes, and also in answer to Parliamentary scrutiny (although as Keynes observed, evidence and political expediency often make unwelcome bedfellows).

On a different tack, and lest we get too enthralled by hard numbers, Eddie Dyja, a former editor of the BFI Film and Television Handbook, cautions against over-reliance on statistics. There are indeed limits to what numbers can tell us, even with unfettered access to our data wish list; which is perhaps another argument in support of Phil Wickham’s call for informed analysis of publicly-available statistics (which in turn is part of the wider debate about the status of expert opinion in the 24/7, self-service information age).

Paul McDonald and Nigel Culkin also touch on the industry’s ambivalent attitude to film education, which links neatly to Cary Bazalgette’s detailed contribution on improving the standard of evidence gathered about publicly- (and industry-) funded education initiatives.

I make no apologies for including Cary's contribution in full here, even though at 2,000 words it could readily stand alone. While most contributors have fixed on the question of what we need to know about the film industry and audiences, Cary’s piece casts light on those other areas of public policy, like film education provision, with equal claim to inclusion in decisions about what kind of public sector research is needed in future.

Once again, my thanks to all the contributors: 

 

Prof. Paul McDonald, Professor of Cinema, University of Portsmouth and
Nigel Culkin, Chair of the Film Industry Research Group (FiRG), University of Hertfordshire

“‘WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW?’ is a vital question directed at the types of knowledge judged to be required to serve certain purposes. But this is a query that invites at least two other questions. ‘WHY DO WE NEED TO KNOW?’: for what reasons do we need evidence on the film industry? And as such evidence can only serve its purposes if it is readily available, then there follows a question of access – ‘HOW CAN WE GET TO KNOW?’

‘WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW?’
Contributors to the blog have provided some answers and acknowledged current deficiencies in data collection and limitations e.g. ignoring productions below £500k.

Approaching this question from academia, when students learn about the shape of the UK’s film market, they need to understand the impact that home video has had on film consumption in the UK since the 1970s. We therefore find it incredibly frustrating with the lack of availability of The Official Charts Company data [TOCC is a commercial provider of UK DVD and Blu-ray sales data]. This situation obstructs detailed analysis on the volume and value of home entertainment apart from broad aggregate figures for the whole market.

‘WHY DO WE NEED TO KNOW?’: the public interest and value argument is a good one. Film is one of the leading forms of cultural expression and as such touches the everyday lives of the public in direct and immediate ways. For that reason potentially all members of the public have an interest in the industry and market of film. What films are produced, why are they produced, how do films get to audiences and, in turn, how do some not get to audiences? These are all questions that inform understanding of modern cultural life in Britain and as such are basic issues in film education. Such questions can only effectively be addressed with a solid evidence base.

(Just an aside. Given that the film industry itself has had to fight so hard to defend its corner against attack from external bodies, it never fails to strike us as bizarre and self-defeating that the business has chosen to repeatedly take an antagonistic stance towards film education - witness recent nonsense from Jeremy Thomas. It’s strange that some film business executives believe the stuff they produce is unworthy of study. Film education is not about vocational skills training for a job market that is already over supplied. It is about stimulating a deep engagement and appreciation of the medium. As film loses ground to other competing media in the attention economy, surely education directed at nurturing an enthusiastic connection with, and knowledge about, film is something to be embraced rather than rejected? Hey, who knows, if the interest is there, then maybe those students will be the very audience for your film? But anyway, that is an argument for another day).

‘HOW CAN WE GET TO KNOW?’: the BFI’s annual handbook grew to become a great resource for data but was considerably surpassed by the UKFC’s Statistical Yearbooks, which in their own way matured over time. The Research and Statistics Unit at the UKFC not only produced the yearbooks but also commissioned numerous reports, and provided a service to users across industry, government and academia, which is universally recognised.

We might question the reliability and coverage of some aspects the data, but this should not distract from the major gain which the RSU brought of providing a publicly accessible resource which made information on the film industry both OPENLY and FREELY available. It is therefore with deep regret that the coalition government’s closure of the UKFC means that future access to the historical data accumulated over the ten years of the Council is in no way assured and that there appears to be no immediate plans for supporting a unit to continue that service.

High cost, commercially produced data and reporting restricts access to knowledge about film. The ‘publicness’ of cinema should mean that a publicly funded agency be charged with making data and analysis on the film business freely available. Will the BFI have the funding and resources to do that? We strongly suspect not.”

 

Phil Wickham, Curator, The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture; former contributor to the BFI Film and TV Handbook

“I think that it is essential that there is access to data on the British film industry, not just for the industry and its organisations but also for those that study film or indeed just take an interest in film culture.

For many years I was involved in collating statistics for the BFI Film and TV Handbook, a publication that hopefully enabled the public to understand how the industry worked and gave a snapshot of screen culture. This data clarified trends and aided arguments about investment, and comparisons with other nations, as well as giving an insight into audience responses, whether that be cinemagoing in general or about particular film titles.

Over the past decade the UK Film Council took charge of this information gathering and its publication. Now that the UKFC will be no more it makes obvious sense for this research function to return to the BFI’s information service – although it is uncertain whether cuts being made to the BFI National Library would make this impossible.

Certainly someone needs to take up the task – we need this information to make the industry and its bodies accountable, to take the temperature of film culture, and to develop some sense of film history.

I now work at the University of Exeter, as Curator of The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture. Our students use the collections we hold to link films to the contexts in which they were made.

Statistics are a vital piece in the jigsaw of evidence that creates good research – knowing that this cult film actually only made x amount of money on its original release; discovering the extent of the fall of cinemagoing in the 1950s, or the revival in cinema screen numbers in the multiplex revolution in the early 1990s; allow us to know the real facts of the relationship between producer and consumer in cinema. Equally, having up to date and reliable data from the past year allows us all to engage with cinema as a medium that still matters.

It is vital that this data is open and available- and that interpretations are made by those that understand what it means and can present it to the world for others to query and assess. We are supposed to be living in an information age but too often data like this has become obscured under the auspices of commercial confidentiality. The public bought the tickets and should know how much a film made and how much it cost, for example – that doesn’t make it a good or a bad film but it is an integral part of its existence.”

 

Dr Nick Redfern, academic and author of the Research into Film blog

“I guess that what I would like to see are three things:

1. A continuing commitment by the newly constituted BFI to producing statistical summaries in line with the past efforts of the UKFC. As some of the activities of the new BFI will be publicly funded there will have to be some requirement for collecting data on the effectiveness of this spending, but the UKFC went beyond this to provide much more information on the film industry in general, and made it freely available. This needs to continue.

2. The quality of information provided by film industry bodies has historically been very poor - it is often limited in scope, out of date, and reflects a lack of attention to detail (perhaps even an abdication of a responsibility given the work of the UKFC in this area). The Film Distributors’ Association and the Cinema Exhibitors’ Association are the main culprits here - they just don't seem to want to make any effort at all and I don't think they can be taken as credible lobbyists for the industry until this is resolved. Every economics textbook will tell that information is the most important commodity in an industry, but no one at the CEA or FDA has noticed this. Perhaps the UKFC was too successful and the industry sees no need to reproduce what it gets from the taxpayer.

The British film industry needs a boot up its backside in general (the government is simply too nice to the industry), but it could do with an extra hard kick here. I would love to know how the FDA and the CEA see their role as providers of information to the industry.

There is an opportunity for a commercial company to steal a march on everyone here - if someone like Box Office Mojo or The Numbers would come in and give us the same depth of data for the UK that we get for Hollywood that would be great.

Daily box office reports for the UK would be a wonderful thing to play with. Why do the reports of box office data have to be limited to the top 15 or top 10? Why can't we have the box office reports for all films on release? We have this information for Hollywood from Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, Variety, etc. We don't have research on the British film industry to compare with that produced by (for example) Andy De Vany and WD Walls on Hollywood (save for John Sedgwick), and this is largely because good quality data is not as available at a reasonable, or no, cost.

3. I would like to see more thought given to what statistics are used to describe the industry. I have doubts about the use of the weekend box office gross as a means of ranking films - the weekend gross was never intended to fulfil this role, and the press generated by big numbers with the move to wide releases in the 1970s should not have been allowed dictate how the industry operates. This represents the triumph of marketing over good sense. I would love to see the daily number of tickets sold for a film rather than gross to see if people really do attend the cinema more during the week than the weekend in the UK. I think this would be more informative of the true state of the British film industry than hearing about X millions of pounds grossed.

Overall, I think the problem is one of accessing data (rather than statistical summaries) so that people who are interested in this area can tease out the important facts and tell everyone else. It needs to be determined what we want to know, who is going to provide this data, and how much it is going to cost - you know, the basics. The BFI needs to pick up the baton from the UKFC, but it cannot be left to public bodies alone.”

 

David Steele, former Head of Research & Statistics Unit, UK Film Council

“What type of information on UK film should be collected? Two points of reference: the Film Policy Review Group (1998) made a specific plea for information about the market performance of British films. They found this information hard to come by in the pre-UK Film Council days. How could they judge the success or challenges of the British film industry without it?

Second, the types of enquiries received from 2001-2011 by the Research and Statistics Unit of the UK Film Council, enquiries about the numbers of British films, their box office here and overseas, how they performed on video, their audiences on TV, their profitability, and all sorts of variants of these questions. Films by budget size and genre, whether they were co-productions or not, who the directors were. And so on.

Where do these enquiries come from? From producers, distributors, prospective film financiers, market researchers, academics, consultants. Mostly small and medium sized British companies or the UK subsidiaries of overseas independents handling British films. Not, by and large, the US studios, because they have their own information systems.

Often enquiries come from central government, from the DCMS itself, on behalf of various Secretaries of State. Statistics for press releases, ministerial speeches, policy papers, answers to Parliamentary Questions.

This makes it particularly odd that no provision has been made (at the time of writing) for research and statistics in the future UK film structure. How will the Secretary of State answer his (or her) PQs in the future? When he/she wants to know how well British films have done in Germany or South America or the USA, how will he/she find out? When DCMS wants to evaluate UK film policy, from where will it get its basic data? To say “the BFI” misses the point, because the gathering of information requires funding and funding is key.

There are two matters of policy here. One relates to the fragmentation of the UK industry. If the UK had one or two dominant studio-scale companies, they would address many of the industry’s information needs. They would have the volume and resources to do so. But the UK industry is a SME industry. It could conceivably band together to fund some sort of central statistical service, but who would care to try to organise that? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of relevant companies, covering several sub-sectors (production, facilities, VFX, distribution, exhibition) organised in their own trade associations, some of which are challenged to fund their own activities. Yet, if the sector is to know how it is performing as an industry, it needs collective data. If there is to be any sort of strategic planning as an industry (and surely we need this, given the UK’s present dire economic state) there has to be information on which to plan.

Second, there is the public interest in information about British film. Not only so that school and university students can answer their essay questions, but so there can be a public discussion about film policy and the impact it has. One thing we know: policy changes. We’ve seen the rise and fall of the UK Film Council, the replacement of one sort of tax relief with another, the change in the definition of a British film, tighter European rules. If policy is to be assessed on the basis of results, we need data. And who is, or should be, the guardian of this public interest? We know the answer. Those who spend their days commuting between Cockspur Street and the Houses of Parliament. It is to be hoped they realise what they need to do before the day when they ask DCMS officials for the latest stats on xyz and are told “I’m sorry Minister, but we don’t collect that information any more.”

 

Eddie Dyja, Freelance writer; former editor of the BFI Film & TV Handbook

“What went missing post-Handbook was a list of all the UK titles and co-productions that made up the overall figures of film production (e.g. 115 films were produced in the UK). The Handbook also followed this through by tracking what happened to all these films over a period of time. I always thought that served as a useful gauge of the health of the UK film industry rather than concentrating on the top 20 films. The problem is about distribution and the fact that the majority of UK films are low budget and would do better on TV than on the cinema circuit.

There is an argument that stats don't actually give a full picture. For example, in the Noughties the top UK films at the UK Box Office didn't get a look in when it came to the Academy Award season and yet the press still somehow use those awards to celebrate British talent.

It raises another interesting question: who, if anyone, are the custodians of UK film culture? (Not film culture in the UK, but UK film culture?).

In the end I think the cinema experience is a matter of personal taste and preference. I'm not sure you can always quantify that experience.”

 

Cary Bazalgette, Chair of the Media Education Association and  former Head of Education, BFI. This contribution has been made in a private capacity

“What do we need to know about film education?

It is common in the world of arts and culture institutions for educational activity to be low status and poorly understood by managers. With some notable exceptions, especially in recent years, there is a natural default position amongst the senior management teams of cultural institutions that the benefits of their particular art form are obvious to all. They will therefore assume that the role of their education departments need only be to ensure that children and young people are exposed to the art form and it will start to work its magic.

There is of course some truth in this. Every practitioner and every enthusiast can point to the moment when they first encountered the art form they now love, and describe how it changed their life from then on. Many will also have horror stories of how their own or other people’s children have been put off that art form by bad teaching.

But in a culture where there will be increasingly bitter fights over every pound of public spending, we need to be sure that if any taxpayers’ money is to be spent on educational work by cultural institutions, it is spent to ensure that children and young people really are benefiting.

This is not new, of course. We have had more than a decade of New Labour’s target-setting and bean counting bureaucracy, which essentially meant spending as little as possible on gathering very simple data to provide “headline” results. To take a current example, the UKFC’s education strategy initiative is trying to gather evidence from teachers using low-cost tick-box questionnaires of this type:

In this project, did any of the young people utilise new skills or display aptitudes/abilities they hadn’t previously?
•    Yes
•    No
Please give details (e.g. teacher/educator/youth worker feedback).

Civil servants (equally ignorant of what educational research can and cannot deliver, and what it can cost to gather robust data) seem to be content to receive the kind of numeric information that can be spun out of responses to this kind of question. If just ten teachers answer it and eight of them tick “yes”, it can be claimed that thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been well spent because 80% of teachers say that their pupils are now using new skills or displaying different attitudes and abilities as a result of a film education initiative.

It is understandable that cultural institutions try to rely on this kind of thing to justify what they have funded, because proper educational research is extremely expensive. To address the question that the example given above is trying to get answers to, the following would be the minimum tasks we’d have to undertake in order to claim that we were even trying to provide realistic and reliable information about the differences that a film education initiative had made to pupils’ learning and abilities:

1. We’d have to establish what benefits we really wanted to look at. There is a big difference between claiming that film education simply supports other more traditional forms of learning, or improves things like behaviour and motivation, and claiming that it has intrinsic value in its own right.

The former tends to be slightly less difficult to prove – indeed, the latter is hardly subject to proof – but it runs the risk of maintaining the low cultural status of film in the education sector by keeping it marginal to the “proper” business of the curriculum. But this would have to be done before we could decide what skills, aptitudes and abilities we wanted to look at.

2. We’d have to gather baseline data on pupils’ skills, aptitudes and abilities before the project started. Skills, aptitudes and abilities are actually three quite different things and each covers an enormous spectrum. So it would make sense to identify some specific examples of each – perhaps including ones on which teachers might already be gathering data anyway – in order to get an idea of where these particular pupils were starting from.

We’d have to decide how to gather this data and whether it would be on all the pupils involved in the project, or on a sample. Educational researchers might ask for a minimum of six pupils to be selected as a focus group, to allow for a range of ability, social class, gender, ethnicity and so on. And the data might be gathered by interviews with teachers, questionnaires to teachers and/or pupils, or classroom observation. In an ideal world, researchers should use all three methods in order to triangulate their evidence.

3. We’d need to ensure that, if we were looking at the effects of more than one film education project, that the projects were comparable and the pedagogic processes used were also comparable. This is pretty much impossible to do in any scientific and objective way, so we’d have to fall back on impressionistic evidence and probably quite a lot of self-reporting: but again, if evidence can be gathered from pupils, teachers and perhaps a third party such as an external provider, some triangulation can be achieved and the addition of some classroom observation by the same researcher or research team visiting all the projects, and produce a richer picture of what went on.

4. Finally we’d have to gather follow-up data that related to the baseline evidence. But when is this best done? It is notoriously common for almost any school initiative (from repainting the corridors to reforming the curriculum) to have positive effects in the short term on pupil performance. But they are likely to fade after a few months, especially if the initiative is not sustained. So ideally we’d do both short term (immediately after the project) and long term (after six months) follow-ups in order to find out (a) whether there had been positive effects and (b) whether these were sustained in the longer term.

5. All of this work would have to be carried out by independent and experienced analysts with recent and relevant experience in educational research – not by consultants who do not necessarily have relevant expertise in film education, and certainly not by the teachers or project providers themselves. Celebratory self-evaluation is rife in the arts education world: it may have its uses (see below) but it doesn’t count as research.

It won’t be difficult to see how expensive this is and how unlikely it is that film education initiatives – for the most part, with one notable exception, under-funded in the first place – are ever going to get access to this kind of research evidence about their effectiveness unless it is built into the whole project from the start. And unless millions are spent on this type of research, so that large samples can be studied, it tends not to produce very headline-grabbing  - ie numerically impressive – results. FIFTEEN PUPILS IMPROVE GCSE RESULTS AFTER HAVING FILM EDUCATION is not going to sell papers.

So what is to be done? 

There are two reasons for trying to gather reliable data on film education initiatives: one is to provide accountability to the taxpayer, and the other is to make the case for the value of education about film.

In this respect, film education differs from education in other art forms. Even though all art forms struggle to argue for their own particular indispensability – witness the current cull of public libraries – film faces particular difficulties given its cultural status in the UK. Not only does a visit to your local multiplex not rate as highly in the cultural stakes as a visit to Tate Modern, the idea that film-viewing is merely entertainment and may indeed have dangerous effects on the young is still very much with us. We have a BBFC to guard us against the ill-effects of film and video viewing but our publishers, theatres and art galleries don’t have to get age-related certificates of suitability for their products. So it’s even harder to make the case for the value of film education in schools, than it is to argue for drama or poetry.

But would solid research evidence make any difference? An interesting case study here could be Film Club. Given £11.3 million over 3 years by the previous Government, they make spectacular claims for their success. They state that 187,000 children are now watching “quality films” every week in 6000 after-school clubs and that standards of pupil attainment are increasing as a result. Setting aside the question of how “quality films” are defined, or how the improvements in attainment have been measured, this would have to mean that all 6000 schools are achieving an average of 31 pupils every single week of the school year. Can this claim be believed?

If Film Club were following the education sector’s rule-of-thumb that 10% of the budget for any new initiative should be spent on research and evaluation, they would have spent over £1 million on backing up this claim with some serious data. That would be very exciting news for us all, and the publication of the data would represent an important coup for film education in the UK.

However, the real test of this claim will be whether Film Club receives further funding from Michael Gove’s new Department for Education to continue their work. If they do, and if their claims are neither substantiated nor challenged, we will have to acknowledge that it is pointless undertaking robust, credible and expensive research into film education: the money will be better spent on PR, because Government will respond to that more readily than they will to real evidence. Those of us who have struggled for many years to gather such evidence about the value of sustained, well-planned and well-taught film education within curriculum time in schools will just have to bite the bullet and recognise that we’re always going to be regarded as a rather sad and po-faced minority.

The inevitable result then must be some sort of compromise on how much research is done into film education, and on its nature. It could be very good news that the BFI can take back from the UKFC the remit for education about film and moving-image media, given that this remit has sat uneasily between the two institutions for the past decade. The current national strategy for film education lacks clarity of purpose and specificity of actions, and attempts awkwardly to draw together the activities of some very diverse institutions: First Light, Film Club, Film Education, the BFI and the Regional Screen Agencies. If a more sharply focused strategy could be created (which should not take long if experienced film educators could be involved), then it should include the following:

1. Simple but consistent numeric data-collection covering numbers of participants, basic demographics (most of which can be gathered from existing Ofsted data), time spent in project activity etc, and omitting any grandiose claims about “impact”. This can be done by project participants and should build a serviceable database over time which can also serve as a rule-of-thumb guide to basic value for money. At present we have no way of comparing the value of, say, a pound spent by First Light as against a pound spent by Film Education.

2. A modest programme of more intensive, qualitative research planned in partnership with a reputable university department and alongside plans for programmes of film education as part of the strategy. The BFI and the university could jointly seek research funding, a likely source being the European Commission. A selection of key initiatives or types of activity worth subjecting to this kind of research should be identified at the outset.

3. Clear and manageable plans for the dissemination of research. These have to range from simple summaries for non-specialists (such as civil servants and the media) to papers in peer-reviewed journals (including online journals) and at academic conferences, and the publication of academic books.  Stories for the media and popularising initiatives such as TV documentaries (cf The Choir) are also important but should not displace or downgrade the importance of traditional dissemination, which can automatically generate its own growth industry of film education-related websites, books, conferences and PhDs.”

What do we need to know? Part 1: industry contributors

“The lack of authoritative, widely available statistics for UK film, video and television, is both a symptom and a cause of the troubles affecting the industry.”
Introduction to the BFI Film and Television Handbook 1993, the first to include a section dedicated to market intelligence

“If we cannot measure trends in performance, we cannot establish with any degree of certainty whether this action plan is having any effect and whether and how it needs to be modified.”
A Bigger Picture, Film Policy Review Group, 1998

“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.”
Donald Rumsfeld, former United States Secretary of Defense

 

What do we need to know? That is the question I put to a number of film industry insiders, analysts, academics and interested observers over the last few weeks.

As worded, the question implies some degree of empirical evidence is necessary to the film business and the state apparatus that supports it, though I was quite prepared to hear from people who felt the contrary was true. Of course, nobody did. In fact, everyone I approached was clear that research and statistics are essential in one form or another, as a means to a variety of ends.

There was plenty of agreement among those I consulted about the types of information of greatest utility and, therefore, value. There were also understandable differences in the relative weight accorded to particular categories of knowledge, and in the reasoning behind individuals’ choices; a reminder that there is no simple answer to the question ‘what do we need to know?’ because it very much depends on where the respondent stands in relation to the industry, and the nature of their interest.

Answers to the question also depend on the direction and goals of public policy for film, as Karsten Grummitt (Dodona Research) points out in his contribution, and it may be premature to draw firm conclusions about what is needed until DCMS and the BFI have formally set out their stall (we can expect a public consultation on draft proposals in due course).

Nevertheless, the idea that some consideration of evidence is necessary for effective policymaking and implementation, as Adam Minns (Pact) argues, is surely true (a conclusion shared by the Film Policy Review Group, quoted above).

As Adam goes on to explain, the issue then becomes how best to harness and balance the respective roles of public and private sector data providers in meeting the demands of evidence-based policy. Steve Perrin (Digital Funding Partnership) is in no doubt of the benefits of public agencies working alongside commercial data providers in this regard.

Of course it’s not just public policy that needs to stay informed of the latest research findings, as the quote above from the introduction to the 1993 BFI Film and Television Handbook makes clear. Nic Wistreich (Netribution) points out that demand for hard data has always been high among diligent film professionals, particularly for business planning to attract investors. Nic introduces the idea that the wider dissemination of such information by public film agencies can serve a ‘common good’, a theme that runs through a number of other contributions.

Though not framed as such, Arvind Ethan David (Slingshot Studios) evokes the idea of the common good when he writes of the ‘informational asymmetry’ between the major Hollywood studios and just about everyone else. In this context, public agencies can perform a vital service by making market intelligence available to local industry players and policymakers- provided that all parties know how to use it.

Producer Stephen Follows (Catsnake) gives another example of the common good when he describes the value derived from research commissioned by the UK Film Council’s Distribution & Exhibition department. Stephen contends this would never have found such free expression by a private source. A number of contributors, including Paul Homer (Phoenix Cinema), Julia Vickers (BFFS) and Alison Small, point to other UK Film Council research publications (the Statistical Yearbook, UK production tracking etc.) as prime examples of service to the common good.

That’s not to suggest UK Film Council output escapes criticism. On the contrary, several contributors, including a number of those previously mentioned, suggest areas for improvement.

For example, Jon Barrenechea (Duke of York’s Picturehouse) detects certain biases in the Statistical Yearbook, and calls for greater emphasis on audience research in a striking parallel with the Film Policy Review Group’s proposal (dating back to 1998) to establish ‘a permanent audience research capability for use by the whole industry - a film industry equivalent of the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board’.

In many cases, gaps in the existing public data record fall into the category of what Donald Rumsfeld once quaintly termed ‘known unknowns’. That is, knowledge deficiencies of which we are aware. Thus, Stephen Follows cites the lamentable lack of data about first time producers and micro budget filmmaking. We understand these represent significant areas of activity (both in their likely scale and as a formative stage in career building), but they occur below the ‘industry radar’ (Nic Wistreich makes a related point when he notes the UK Film Council does not track productions budgeted under £500k).

Clive Davies-Frayne (Filmutopia) gives the lack of readily available data about return on investment (ROI) for British film projects as another example of a ‘known unknown’ that can seriously hamper investment decisions, yet there is no easy way to address this omission.

Emma Biggins (Multistory Films), speaking from direct experience, observes that first time producers are likely to encounter more ‘known unknowns’ than established players by virtue of limited access to privileged, insider data (and, given their relative inexperience, new entrants doubtless also encounter a good many ‘unknown unknowns’. Although they won’t know it, of course).

One way to tackle many of the most common ‘known unknowns’ cited by contributors is to find some way to mine the rich seams of data held by private companies, a point made most persuasively by Angus Finney. Angus argues the common good can be usefully served by more concerted data sharing by sales companies, and he claims measures can be taken to overcome objections to this on the grounds of commercial sensitivity.
 
So: the contributions reported below cover a very wide terrain. The most salient conclusion to draw is that the act of gathering, analysing and disseminating film research and statistics is too important to be ignored. If you think that sounds portentous, I can go further: the question of who does what and to what end needs urgent consideration in the next phase of film policy development.

The remainder of this post gives voice to the views of industry contributors name-checked above. A follow-up post will do likewise from the perspective of academia and the wider research community. And in a final post concluding this series I’ll attempt to draw the various threads together and offer some thoughts on future options.

My thanks to all the contributors, and please feel free to join the discussion through the comments box.


Karsten Grummitt, Managing Director, Dodona Research; author of the Black Dove blog
“The question of what types of data public agencies ought to be collecting and disseminating is really meaningless in the absence of an agreement as to the goals of the public agency. In the case of film this agreement is generally elusive because film is both a cultural product and a business, and the boundary between these two aspects is both fluid and fundamentally unclear. A cynic might suggest that the only time the two aspects truly come together is when the business asks for a cultural subsidy so that it can turn a profit.

Keeping them separate, and considering first the question of culture, it’s hard to see the need for any data collection at all. In pretty well every country worldwide, defending cultural patrimony in the film business means rigging statistics to claim every film you can as a national film. Co-productions are a well-established way to get the numbers up, and the UK Film Council got pretty inventive with the idea of culturally British or whatever it was. The market share of national films is important to film agencies, it’s their reason for being. But to the public, country of origin statistics are irrelevant: film is a responsive, not to say opportunistic, business with very short product life cycles. If audiences show a taste for films about, for example, the British monarchy, appropriate films will generally turn up to meet the demand.

Looking at the question from a business point of view, insofar as a great deal of data gathered about the film industry is gathered by private organisations (including mine), interventions by public agencies to disseminate it more widely are genuinely useful, as indeed are the data collection activities of film agencies. But it can be a rather negative kind of usefulness: one look at the numbers and it’s pretty clear that huge swathes of the film business are not a business. Investors would do well to study the data.

Whether it might be useful for public agencies to disseminate different types of data is another question. What film entrepreneurs or investors arguably most need to know (after how to judge a script) is how much money a project might make, with the favourite route to a guesstimate being the performance of comparable films. In this area, public agencies are inhibited by the blanket prohibition on revealing data relating to individual firms.

At present I would guess it is still effectively impossible to obtain, meaningfully estimate, or model data concerning the income from a single film that has enjoyed any appreciable life as a commercial entity. There are too many sources of income earned in, hopefully, too many territories. Some relevant data is available from established sources, most of it is not. Only those closely involved in the production and exploitation of the film are in a position to see the full picture and, given the state of accounting in parts of the motion picture industry, even this may be questionable. So this doesn’t seem to me an area where the state or its agencies could produce reliable data, or should tread.”


Adam Minns, director of policy, Pact
“There is absolutely a role for public agencies and/or Government to gather and publish market information – any policy or market intervention by Government should be based on a reliable evidence base, and in the film industry there are a lot of interventions! Without that evidence base, we run the risk of regulators or politicians being captured by the most powerful interest groups.
 
That doesn’t mean that bodies such as Pact don’t have an important role in this area either. Pact will commission many reports and studies over the year to inform our campaigning – on anything from exports, to the size of the production sector, through to our recent report on building a sustainable film industry. Obviously we want the data to stand up to scrutiny if we are going to persuade the regulator or Government to act on it. But equally, as a trade association, we serve the interests of independent film, television and digital media producers. We can be the first to identify trends or gaps in Government’s understanding, but our work is not a substitute for the Government or another independent body conducting its own research to establish the accuracy of our analysis, or at the very least employing someone who is comfortable with data to interrogate it.
 
What sort of data do we need in film? We thought the annual yearbook produced by the Film Council, some of it based on data from industry stakeholders, was very useful as a one-stop overview of the film sector and would welcome its continuation through an independent body or a Government department. We would have to be careful to preserve the granular understanding of the film business, though – ONS data is often too high level, for example.
 
What sort of data don’t we need? Pact does not think it is the role of the public sector to tell companies how to develop their businesses, so we would be nervous about a public body commissioning research into specific issues as part of an agenda. Nor should the public sector try to replace the industry – we don’t need public money to be spent on research that the market is providing already, particularly where that data is part of a business to business service already.”


Steve Perrin, Chief Executive, Digital Funding Partnership (UK); former Head of RSU, UK Film Council and Managing Director, Nielsen EDI
“The UK film industry may be deficient in a number of areas. However, statistics is not one of them. Web sites abound with box office data, production costs, profit estimates etc. Equally, the mainstream press have an apparent love affair with such data, using them to draw conclusions that are in the main spurious. Until now, the UK Film Council has filled the role of co-ordinating, quality controlling, commenting on and disseminating such data in a manner that is authoritative, insightful and universally accepted as a veridical picture of the industry.
 
With the imminent closure of the UKFC, it is as yet unclear where this function will reside, if indeed anywhere at all. It is thus imperative that all relevant parties, both commercial and public, seek to determine the future direction of statistical analysis and data dissemination if the UK, the third largest box office generator in the world, is not to become the only major country in the modern world without such a facility. Such a state of affairs would be highly detrimental to an industry that is worth billions to the UK economy.” 

 

Nic Wistreich, Director, Netribution; editor of The Film Finance Handbook
“Netribution has always had a steady flow of questions from people wanting to find good film data - indeed one of our most successful sections when we launched was the statistics sections as there was very little online other than the MPA yearbook. Mostly the data is for preparing business plans for films or sometimes investors trying to judge the value of a business plan. But good data also informs general understanding of the market for all sorts of people - technology providers, platforms, academics - even kids trying to convince their parents that a career in filmmaking isn't a dead-end option.

But most importantly, I think, it's a 'common good' - i.e. it's public investment into something that makes life easier for many people inside and outside the industry without prejudice. This kind of universal service not only benefits the film community, it comes with no barriers to access and is non-discriminatory. It's like the free press lists that the Scottish Arts Council used to make available to anyone via their website - by saving small arts organisations the trouble of compiling this themselves it's a kind of universal in-kind grant.

Of course it could be significantly improved. One big shortfall is failure to track production activity below £500k, not to mention short films, indie-documentary, community video and the broad range of professional production in the UK outside film and TV.

And then there's the web. Aside from any data from iTunes and the VoD services, how many British filmmakers have their work on YouTube and similar sites? How many collective views have they had? I know of British filmmakers posting work to YouTube with over 4 million views, who make a living from this, yet are completely unknown and disconnected from conventional film circles.

It would also be interesting to see more data offered raw as a CSV/XML so third parties could build apps around it.  For instance - cross referencing box office records in the UK for the last decade or more against FindAnyFilm.com or IMDB would be incredibly useful for those putting investment plans together to be able to pull together a list of the top ten grossing foreign language documentaries, or gangster films not starring Ray Winstone, or films longer than 4 hours, for instance.”


Arvind Ethan David, CEO, Slingshot Studios
“I think my starting point is that the informational asymmetry between the bulk of producers (and policy makers) on the one hand, and the Studios, is a serious impediment to both sound business strategy or policy making.   A longer post on this subject can be found here.
 
As that post starts to suggest, the problem is not just in what data is available, it’s also in what data the press, the public and the policy makers tend to fixate on – though the second is in part a function of the former. When even the minister in charge feels free to talk about BO [box office] as the key indicator of profitability without reference to costs or other revenue streams, you start to realize how bad the problem is.
 
I think the UKFC’s soon to be defunct policy unit did valuable work in collecting data, but a less good job in making it available in usable forms to the industry.  The Statistical Yearbook was fine, but what would have been more useful is raw data, available online, and searchable, sliceable, and capable of manipulation and republishing in an open govt. model.   It’s worrying that this function has been more or less lost, and whilst the industry has it in separate pots (BVA, [Rentrak] EDI, Screen, etc etc) it’s not clear who – outside the Studios – has the motivation to collate it and use it for the broader good.
 
Perhaps the BFI or PACT could negotiate a low cost ‘cottage industry’ discount to [Rentrak]’s full Flash service and the BVA lobbied to make their data more available...?
 
Even then, though, I fear a little that comparative innumeracy amongst our producers would make it of limited use to them, but at least distributors, sales agents, financiers, consultants and (hope against hope) policy framers could have access to better data.”


Stephen Follows, Producer, Catsnake
“What do we need to know?  Two things – who are we, and what do we need to improve?
 
Who Are We?
It’s easy to measure the number of large to mid-level productions as they are ‘on the radar’ of the industry.  However this ignores a huge number of small to micro budget productions in the UK.  To my knowledge the best measure of UK films is the UKFC’s annual report and the British Council’s annual Cannes book.  But these are very surface level and don’t give us the full picture.
 
It also counts productions, not personnel.  I have been asked on a number of occasions how many producers there are in the UK and I honestly have no idea!  I know how many members the New Producers’ Alliance had, how many on the Raindance lists, etc but these are sporadic, anecdotal pieces of data picked up in the course of conversations.  
 
I recognise that the problem is far from simple as defining who is a producer isn’t an easy task but we should at least have someone/some body trying.  Without a union or any qualifications needed to do the job we have no way of knowing even on what order of magnitude the number is.  The more success a producer has the easier it is to measure them (published numbers include the number of UK producers at the Cannes Producer’s Network, the number of producers supported by regional screen agencies, etc) but this only counts the producers after they’ve had some success.  How can we help producers at the start of their careers if we don’t know who they are or even how many of them there are?!
 
And if we’re going to have a system that only provides support when the producers come forward themselves then we need a much clearer system and aim to help a broader number of people.  At the moment early-stage producers create their own informal support networks by getting to know people randomly and floundering for a while.
 
The current system only tracks and helps producers who have done ‘something’ and ignores the ones that need help the most.
 
What Do We Need to Work On?
I have found Peter Buckingham’s research and analysis on film audiences fascinating and extremely helpful in my job as a producer.  An institution like the UKFC is the only place that such a body of work could have amassed and it’s very sad to think that it will stop.  I can’t see any private organisation being so supportive of such work and also so free with the findings.
 
The thing that always seemed strange to me was why his work isn’t more widely known.  Peter and the UKFC are hardly secretive about their results but still there is widespread ignorance on the issue in the independent film sector.  I’m not sure what was failing here but there exists a gap between the creation of the data / analysis and the very professionals that need to know.  It could be a problem of the UKFC not having the resources to promote it, a poor promotion strategy or producers’ unwillingness to seek out such data – I don’t know.  But I’m sure that a wider understanding of Peter Buckingham’s audience research would help improve UK films commercially.”


Paul Homer, Chief Executive, Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley
“Industry statistics, when accurate, collated and properly analysed are vital to any business in the industry.  They enable us to make informed decisions about how and where to grow our business.  How much to spend on advertising, how to best serve our customers and how we compare with industry averages.
 
The role of the Film Council in this area has, over the last few years, become indispensable.  Previously there was no one-stop shop to find the information one needed.  With the advent of the Film Council suddenly there was loads of useful data, well presented and well analysed.
 
Not only that, but crucially for an organisation of our size, this data was publicly available.  We didn’t have to rely on headline information from the far-too-expensive Screen Digest – which whilst great are an unjustifiable expense for our organisation.
 
The demise of the Film Council has been interesting, as it appears that almost all of its functions, and thus spending, have been transferred to other organisation.  The argument about saving money then is not valid here.  However what is as yet unclear is whether the vital work carried out by the stats unit will also continue.  It seems like madness for such a mature sector to suddenly rid itself of such important information.  Information without which the sector will be poorer, figuratively and literally.
 
The industry needs this data to continue to be gathered and analysed and it needs to be freely available to the industry.”


Julia Vickers, Partnerships and Development Consultant, British Federation of Film Societies
"I believe it's vital that we keep track of what's happening across all parts of the industry - with resources becoming ever more limited it's the only way to ensure there is evidenced best value for money (be it public, corporate or personal).

The inclusion of BFFS-originated data in the UKFC Statistical Yearbook's Exhibition chapter has helped to raise the profile of the UK's thriving community cinema movement. Provided we have the means to do so, we will continue to collect data about film societies and other community cinema providers through our annual survey and updates to our Community Cinema Database, to complement whatever future arrangements are made for UK film research more generally."


Alison Small, Consultant; former Senior Executive International Production, Office of the British Film Commissioner, UK Film Council
“I sometimes feel like a lone voice banging on about the importance of the information coming out of the research that UKFC puts together. The information on levels of production is the tip of the iceberg, and the ability to look at where production takes place in the UK, the companies producing those films, the budget levels and the backers is essential information to anyone looking to develop business, from regional post production facilities to well established studios in the South of England.”

[This contribution originally appeared as a comment in response to an earlier post. I’ve reproduced it, with permission, because of its relevance here]


Jon Barrenechea, General Manager, Duke of York's Picturehouse; author of the Splendor Cinema blog
“For years, the UKFC’s annual yearbook was a fascinating (if somewhat biased) insight into the UK’s film industry which went beyond the usual production-focused numbers and delved deep into the guts of what the business is made of: movies, the people who make, distribute and ultimately show them.

With the demise of the UKFC and the ‘bonfire of the quangos’, where will we get this information? How do decision makers get their information without paying exorbitant market research fees? What will the new and ‘improved’ BFI do to let us know how it’s spending lottery money?

I’ve worked as an exhibitor for the last seven years and I recently completed a Master’s degree where I researched the UK film industry for my dissertation. I have read every report, yearbook, white paper and research around the film business that has been published in the past decade. I’ve also attended quite a few international events, conferences and training courses on the continent where the UKFC Yearbook was praised for its thoroughness. The CNC in France are the only other body to produce such a comprehensive document.

There are two sides to the question- what did we need to know during the UKFC’s time, and what do we need to know now, post-UKFC? One frustration I always have had with the Yearbook is the way it merges the amount of public funding for distribution and exhibition into one category, making it almost impossible to accurately quantify the amount of money given to support either of these (very) different fields. My suspicion is that the reason was that the support for exhibition was so paltry so as to be an embarrassing figure on its own, and the combined number gave the Council a better, rounder statistic to throw around.

So, post-UKFC, what do we need? For me, understanding audiences is the beginning, middle and end. The numbers are important, of course, but they exist in a vacuum unless we understand what is the audience experience and opinion of what happens on the ground. More focus groups, surveys, polls and opinion is needed (and this can help shape public policy). Most of the research done in this area is commercial, proprietary and therefore inaccessible to most. The Arts Council published a couple of reports which delve deep into the participation and engagement of audiences in the arts, but sadly, there is no film-specific information.

So, to conclude, we need numbers, yes, but we need them to be objective and specific, and to link to what is happening on the ground, in cinemas, and some thorough analysis that links the two in a cause-effect way, so that we can both allocate public funds responsibly and so that those in decision-making positions can make informed choices.”


Clive Davies-Frayne, Managing Director, Filmutopia; author of Filmutopia's Sunday Morning Movie Blog
“I'm not sure that the kind of data that would be useful is possible to get. I remember discussing film financing with a guy in the City of London. He told me that films could get plenty of investment if they could get the return/risk figures right. So, offering a high ROI, with a less than 30% risk of failure.

One of the biggest problems in presenting a coherent business plan to investors is providing reliable data on ROI on similar projects. From my perspective: accurate figures of what returns to the producers can be expected for British movies, for the various sales opportunities and territories. So, what are the actual economics of a limited print UK theatrical distribution, in a particular genre? I have no idea at all about how that could be achieved, but I do know that the lack of open and accurate data is a hurdle that doesn't help the industry.”


Emma Biggins, Producer, Multistory Films
“The UKFC research pages were a starting point for me, and certainly gives a very broad idea of the bigger picture (excuse the pun) i.e. number of films being made each year, how many are indies, etc, (although I think the definition of an independent film is skewed). But it also spurred me on to try and find other sources of information - mostly these were actual production companies and other producers, hence why I gave the UKFC as a research reference in my blog post.

But in truth, in terms of statistics and how they and the UK Film Council website affected my decisions, their influence was minimal. As a micro-budget first-time producer the information I really wanted and needed was near impossible to find - how all these films get financed, budget information (real budgets!), sales information - (and how much revenue actually goes to the producer/production company). Statistics on indie production companies and their growth and viability based on their slates of films and the amount of equity they are maintaining in each film (if any). All this information is always well guarded, I often find myself exploring with envy, a lot of Australian film web sites. Their film industry, it's upkeep and incentives are so much more attractive and accessible.”

Angus Finney, author of The International Film Business: A Market Guide Beyond Hollywood
“I think we need some basic research done beyond just the key stats and analysis thrown up by the production sector. That said, I'd like to see what happened re the dwindling co-productions (specifically UK-EU partners), and to track that landscape in detail going forwards. For example, a change in UK-spend laws let alone a visionary move into Eurimages would throw up a plethora of interesting data if decent benchmarking exists.

The areas that need more data are in the sales, international distribution and export arena. Real figures, not just guff. Cost of reaching the market (AFM, Cannes, Berlin), cost of festival launches (from Cannes to Toronto to Rotterdam, etc), sales commission spreads, price ranges, etc. Sales companies love to say that this information is commercially sensitive (I know, I ran one), but pooling this information could be done in a productive manner without any one company being exposed or damaged.  

We need more data on what happens to vertically integrated companies who are operating and re-structuring to the new content value chain. Especially those with one foot in TV and digital content (plus music etc - think Warp), and the other in feature film.

What this would throw up is more business model data and analysis, which would attract further academic as well as practitioner insights. None of the UKFC data dug into this area in depth. We need this to understand how content production, distribution and, ultimately, revenue streams are adapting to the new user-driven, multi-platform world that arrived earlier than just yesterday.”

Film data: what do we need to know?

Last night I was musing on which, if any, of the historical, headline data reported in the previous post can tell us anything useful about the ‘sustainability’ of the British film industry.

Unable to sleep (and still reeling from the awfulness of 10 O’Clock Live), connections formed in my mind between the data and certain recent developments, including Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s appearance at a London School of Economics event (I  know. On reflection I should have taken a sleeping pill).

Contrary to what we’d been told about perniciously high salaries and quango combustibility, the Minister informed his audience the decision to abolish the UKFC was down to their ‘failure to arrest the relative decline of the British independence [sic] film-making sector, compared with those of France, Germany and even Italy’ (as reported by Raymond Snoddy).

“There ought to be a huge opportunity for British independent filmmakers to grow and grow to a significant size”, the Minister is quoted as saying in Snoddy’s report in The Spectator.

Let’s leave aside the merits (or otherwise) of this argument for the time being. I’m more interested to know upon what basis the Minister made this judgement. Unless I missed it, the analysis didn’t appear in Maud Mansfield’s paper on the British film industry, prepared for the (then) Shadow DCMS team last year. That gave UKFC a reasonably warm pat on the back.

I’m not disputing the idea that independent filmmaking has declined in the UK. I’d simply like to know what data, models and assumptions were used to arrive at this conclusion, because (arguably) these same numbers could also tell us something useful about ‘sustainability’- which would make them ideal candidates for judging the success of film policy under the BFI. We should be told.

There’s a wider issue here, and it concerns what research and market intelligence is needed in the public domain, both to judge the success of public policy and to help tackle the ‘information asymmetry’ underlying market failure within UK film (see Angus Finney’s The International Film Business: A Market Guide Beyond Hollywood for more on this subject). Many SMEs are disadvantaged by limited access to good quality market data and analysis for business planning, so there’s scope for the public sector to add considerable value by making such information available at little or no cost.

The opportunity to ask this question afresh comes with UKFC’s imminent closure, and uncertainty over the future of its research function. There’s been no specific mention of funding to continue the work of the Research & Statistics Unit, so 2011 could be the last year we see a Statistical Yearbook. And unless Film London (for example) takes on the role of tracking UK production activity and reporting the numbers, the type of release issued yesterday by UKFC will also cease.

So while the practical decisions about public funding for film are still being taken (and while we have a chance to influence that decision making), let’s put together a wish list of the most useful and relevant information for gauging the present state and future prospects of our national industry. What do we need to know?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be soliciting the views of well-regarded industry commentators and well-placed insiders (as well as some noteworthy outsiders), with the aim of posting the widest range of views on what research and market intelligence we’d like to see freely available post-UKFC. I hope you’ll join the debate.

BFI offers first glimpse of future film policy

I had intended to make the first post of 2011 a bumper compilation of annual admissions and box office totals from around the world, but the numbers are still coming in so it’ll have to wait (for example, UKFC will publish UK box office and market share numbers on 20 January).

But here’s something to chew over in the meantime. Today saw the first public pronouncement on the likely shape of film policy under the BFI, cunningly disguised as an advertisement for new Trustees.

You may have heard the BFI is looking to recruit five new Board members, details of which can be found on the web site. Among the supporting documents offered to prospective candidates is an overview of the BFI’s transformation into ‘A New Organisation for Film’, providing a glimpse of how the handover from UKFC and the strategic objectives for film are developing.

The document confirms much of what we’ve already been told: the BFI will assume responsibility for all Lottery funding for film, as well as the Film Certification Unit, the MEDIA Desk and funding of Creative England, in the process becoming ’a coherent new body’ with ‘a clear, single strategy for film in the UK.’

Then in a section entitled ‘Founding Aspirations’ the document sets out – for the first time, that I’m aware of- the emerging strategic goals of the new body:

'1. Effect a smooth and supportive transition of responsibilities from the UK Film Council to the BFI;

2. Achieve a vibrant film culture and successful film industry across the UK;

3. Achieve the best balance between economic benefit and cultural benefit;

4. Strengthen the sustainability of film businesses;

5. Maximise the use of Lottery and other public funds for front line activities, and reduce bureaucracy and costs so that more money can be concentrated on film activities;

6. Achieve greater coherence across the whole film sector; and

7. Develop partnerships with other bodies that substantially increase the impact and reach of British films (for example, working with broadcasters to increase exhibition opportunities for film, on broadcast TV and video on demand, as well as on the big screen).'

If it all sounds rather familiar, that’s because it is: 

(1) is reasonable enough: 'steady as she goes'.

(2) has been cribbed directly from UKFC’s homework book.

(3) implies a clear distinction between economic and cultural benefits of film, which may be less clear in reality. Besides, any ‘balance’ to be struck is needed in terms of support not outcome.

(4) supplies the obligatory reference to the S word (see earlier post 'On Sustainability: UK Film Policy After the UK Film Council').

(5) is very much in tune with Government mood music ('Do More for Less').

(6) is a mystery- I’ve no idea what it means. Anyone?

(7) sounds like a jolly good idea, but will Sky take note? That’s the real challenge.

There’s nothing here that UKFC hadn’t previously committed to deliver, or would have committed to had it been given half a chance. Granted it is still early days, yet on the available evidence the only thing the BFI offers afresh is that it will do much the same as the previous incumbents but for fewer Scooby snacks.

The document also sets out some next steps and a timetable, including a public consultation ‘on a new, refreshed film policy across all areas from archive, through distribution, exhibition, skills and education, to production’ during spring 2011. This will report in the autumn, for introduction from 1 April 2012. In addition the new BFI Board will establish a Film Strategy Development Task Force chaired by the as-yet-to-be recruited Deputy Chair (though presumably with minimal administrative support, to keep back office costs down and help preserve front line activities).

Awakenings

I've spent the summer mulling the future of this blog. What began as a short break to recharge my batteries became, with surprising rapidity, a happy release from the treadmill of posts. As the weeks and months have passed I've grown accustomed to not committing my thoughts to the ether, a habit that I'm only breaking now because the moment feels right.

More than that, I've found a new purpose for the blog, and nothing is more motivating. Despite a growing readership and a subscriber base that numbers in the hundreds (i.e. a level of success for a niche blog I never anticipated), earlier this year I was struggling to justify the work involved, which contributes nothing to my income.

Fortunately, I was never in it for the money. At the time I started the blog I simply wanted to be part of a wider conversation about the film business with people who share my passion.

Truth is, the blog failed to generate the level of commentary from readers, and therefore affirmation, that I'd hoped. After nearly 200 posts, I've had 50 comments in total (for which I'm grateful, don't get me wrong).

And despite some very favourable words about the blog, some of which appear in the right-hand sidebar, I began to lose heart in the whole enterprise. It's a funny thing: when you don't get paid for your graft, you have to measure value and worth in other ways. In the absence of feedback, that's a real challenge.

So what's changed? Well, there's the small matter of the biggest shake-up in British film policy for a decade. The announcement in July that the UK Film Council is to be abolished has enormous ramifications. Whenever a big beast falls in the forest, the effect is felt up and down the food chain.

Now is not the time to unpack all that this shift in film policy augers, but one thing is clear and germane to re-launching the blog. With the Film Council gone (don't expect it to hang around much after next April) there's a very real danger that the type of research covered in this blog will cease to be available from publicly accessible sources. Goodbye Statistical Yearbook. So long UK production analyses (like that published today). No more studies into the local cinema ecology, cultural impact of British film, film education provision and so on.

Some recent commentators have ridiculed UKFC's research output, characterising it as partial and manipulated. Nonsense. The Research and Statistics Unit's output is one of the richest sources of film data and analysis anywhere in the world. Some UKFC press releases may have prioritised certain findings over others to tell a particular story, but the underlying research has always been sound, and open to scrutiny and challenge. 

But who will pick up the torch once UKFC is no more? The BFI is a likely contender. After all, they published the Film and Television Handbook for many years before the Statistical Yearbook stole their thunder. But this seems fanciful given the Institute is facing a 15% cut to its already over-stretched budget.

Maybe Arts Council England (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland)? They look favourite to inherit UKFC's lottery funding responsibilities. Trouble is, the bulk of UKFC's research activity was funded through grant-in-aid, not lottery. And that looks like it will simply vanish once the lights go off in Little Portland Street.

Besides, ACE has no previous form in handling market intelligence data of the sort we're talking about. 

So the future looks bleak for the types of research that had previously been used to inform both strategic and tactical film policy decisions, as well as supporting business planning in the private sector up and down the country. What's more, the academic research community will suffer with the loss of these free resources.

So where does that leave Bigger Picture Research? Hard to say until we know for certain what will replace UK Film Council. But if film research as we've come to know it becomes scarcer on the ground, there's even more reason to collate whatever we can still lay our hands on. Whatever new direction film policy takes, it is imperative that those in charge are held to account. That can only be achieved with insight, analysis and no small degree of hard evidence.

Bigger Picture Research has a mission.

The first post will come as soon as the government announces UKFC's successor(s). In the meantime, I'd recommend interested readers should strip mine the RSU's page on the UKFC's web site. Download as much as you can before the switch is thrown. After all, that's the baseline data we'll be working with in the months and years to come. Get it while you can.

European box office, cinema admissions and feature production, 2009

With Cannes almost upon us, the European Audiovisual Observatory has released its annual round up of European box office, admissions, market share and feature production numbers, in advance of next week's publication of FOCUS 2010: World Film Market Trends.

The numbers, some of which are based on provisional data, paint an encouraging picture of cinema going and film making in apparent rude health (certainly at an aggregate level).

Headline data as follows:

• Total EU box office gross reached a record high of EUR 6.27 billion in 2009, a rise of 12% over 2008.
• Admissions rose by 6% to an estimated 981.1 million in 2009, up from 925.3 million in 2008.
• Annual box office gross increased in 21 of the 23 EU member states for which data are available, with only Ireland and Latvia seeing a decline. Admissions increased in 20 EU markets, and deceased in only six (see Table 1).
• European films had a market share of 26.7% of total EU admissions, down from 28.2% in 2008 and the lowest level since 2005.
• Market shares for national films declined in 18 out of 23 member states for which data were available in 2009.
• French films remained the most successful films in the EU market in terms of admissions. German films ranked second, taking 4.1% of the total, followed by UK productions accounting for 3.9% of total EU admissions.
• The Observatory estimates 1,168 feature films, including feature documentaries which accounted for 20% of the total, were produced in the EU in 2009, 28 more than in 2008 (the previous record year).
• The Observatory cautions that ‘differences in production measurement methodology between European countries make it difficult to evaluate the effects or non-effects of the economic crisis on overall production output in 2008 and 2009.’ ‘Nevertheless’, the press release continues, ‘the high in 2009 production data suggests that the European public funding system has prevented production levels from dropping significantly.’
• For the first time in recent years, Germany had Europe's highest production output (194 feature films), followed by France (182 features).

Click to enlarge:

You can find additional data and tables on the Observatory’s web site (including details of the top 20 performing titles at the European box office).

For those of you heading to Cannes (ash plume permitting), the Observatory is hosting a digital cinema workshop in the Salle Buñuel (Palais des Festivals) on Sunday 16th of May from 3.00 pm to 4.30 pm.

Speakers include Professor Ian Christie, Vice President of Europa Cinemas, Christine Eloy of Europa Distribution, Aviva Silver, Head of the MEDIA Programme of the European Union, and Antoine Virenque, President of the European Digital Cinema Forum. There’ll be a further announcement about European digital cinema data on 12 May.

Plus if the fancy takes you, you can swing around to the Observatory’s stand at the Marché du Film (stand A6 Riviera) and collect your free copy of FOCUS 2010: World Film Market Trends (a PDF version will be available online in due course).

A quick film business blog round up

Keeping up to date with industry commentators and the musings of well-placed insiders is one of the more enjoyable aspects of maintaining this blog. Reading widely around the subject has become a necessary habit, and it rarely becomes onerous.

The print-led trade press has always performed a valuable service in this regard, marshalling fact and opinion in digestible portions. But the internet- particularly web 2.0 platforms like Twitter, blogs and the like- puts readers/listeners/viewers in touch with developments in a more immediate and less filtered way.

Best of all, it’s possible (as suits your needs) to move seamlessly between eavesdropping and networking, between bearing mute witness to and actively participating in an ongoing conversation among the informed, the interested or the idly curious.

Quite how dynamic this free and fulsome exchange of film business information has become is evidenced by the blog roll in the right hand sidebar, which has grown enormously since this blog started, and continues to expand (although it is still only a fraction of what’s out there).

Anyway, I want to draw attention to some recent additions that make an excellent contribution to the ongoing conversation.

I’ll start with the most recent of recent additions, The A.K.A. Indie Film Blog. Author and industry consultant Jeremy Juuso kicked off this blog last month with a post about Cantor Fitzgerald’s movie futures market, the Cantor Exchange.

Juuso is author of Getting the Money: A Step-by-Step Guide for Writing Business Plans for Film, and I first strayed across his writings from a link on Ted Hope’s blog to a post on Baseline Research’s Research Wrap site about the box office chances of ‘self-released specialty films’ in the US.

It’s a canny and provocative analysis (witness Hope’s commentary), and the issues raised are absolutely pertinent at this time of shifting film distribution models.

As well as filing copy for Baseline Research, Juuso runs a consultancy whose web site hosts a marvellous array of freely accessible film data.

Throughout 2009 Juuso published monthly PDF reports listing independent and ‘independent-style’ films released theatrically in the US. Among the data included for each title are details of their theatrical release pattern and box office numbers, the involvement of above-the-line star talent, plus estimates of the budget and a summary of financing sources.

The information is derived from various online and public sources, and each title takes Juuso around 2-3 hours to research. ‘The goal’, as Juuso told me when I enquired about his approach, ‘is to paint a clearer picture for filmmakers and investors of just what kind of landscape they face when launching an indie film geared toward the US market.’

The result is a detailed release catalogue, of obvious benefit to anyone drafting a business plan or thinking of acting on one (or, for that matter, anyone trying to understand the way the contemporary indie sector operates in the US).

Screen Finance used to provide a similar service in the UK (for the price of a subscription), until it bit the dust last year (the bfi Library tells me the last issue of Screen Finance they hold is dated 17 December 2009, following Tim Adler’s departure to manage the London bureau of Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood blog). In the absence of Screen Finance, I’d love to see Juuso’s approach replicated in the UK and Europe.

Alongside the monthly PDFs you can find The A.K.A. Report 2009, an overview of the US theatrical market based on analysis of summary data. And returning to where we began, the first post on Juuso’s A.K.A. blog lays bare the operation of the Cantor Exchange in lucid detail (check out entertainment attorney Roger Goff's blog for another view of the same). If, like me, you’re only dimly aware of terms like ‘going long’ and the ‘short position’ from coverage of the global banking crisis, Juuso’s post lifts the shroud on this arcane world and makes it comprehensible.

Now to a blog of a very different order. David Graham is CEO of Attentional, a television industry data provider and consultancy that supplies, among other things, BARB data to the UK Film Council, and is responsible for a number of film-related projects over the years including a study of the economic impact of the UK screen industries (with Cambridge Econometrics and Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates).

Graham’s newly launched blog, Building an Entertainment Powerhouse, takes a critical look at the current model for UK TV, setting out alternatives informed by a staunchly (but not unthinking) free market approach. There’s an engaging openness about the posts, and Graham has the advantage of working from hard data in crafting and elaborating his position. Check out, for example, his posts on the desirability of a European Pay-TV platform, and the growth of internet-based TV viewing and its implications for the licence fee. It’s still relatively early days, but this blog is definitely one to watch and will no doubt become more relevant if the general election goes David Cameron’s way tomorrow.

Over the coming weeks I plan to introduce other relevant industry blogs in a similar way, so if you have any suggestions for inclusion I’d be grateful to hear them. I’m particularly interested to learn about film business blogs from outside the UK and US.

UK cinema admissions and UK feature production activity, Q1 2010

Volcanic hyperemesis and bureaucratic incompetence conspired to keep me and the family in Portugal for a week longer than planned, hence the lack of recent posts. But at least we enjoyed a few more days at arm’s length from election campaigning (more of which later).

Looking across various news feeds, trade publications and assorted correspondence I see it’s been quite a fecund period for the type of research of interest here. I won’t attempt to cover it all in a single post, so expect a burst of activity over the next week as I work through the backlog.

To ease back into the swing of things, let’s begin with a UK-themed update on first quarter activity.

First off, cinema admissions. Last week, cinema advertising firm Pearl and Dean (P&D) was finally sold off for £1 after four years on the market. Regular readers will recall P&D forms one half of the Cinema Advertising Association (along with Digital Cinema Media), the trade association whose charitable work includes releasing monthly admissions data compiled by Nielsen EDI/Rentrak. Here’s hoping P&D’s new owners continue in this same vein in future.

In the meantime, the CAA has released admissions numbers for March, allowing us to gauge the strength of the UK theatrical market during the first quarter of the year. It’s a positive picture, with a total of 14,482,606 tickets shifted in March- the strongest performance for the month in recent memory.

This brings the total for the first three months of the year to 43,957,027, up 6% on the same period in 2009, and the highest figure since 2002 (Figure 1). Clearly the big screen continues to work its magic on audiences.

Figure 1: UK cinema admissions, Q1 (January to March) 2002 to 2010

Source: CAA/ Rentrak

Turning to UK feature production, the UK Film Council has released the latest data from its regular tracking work, covering the first three months of the year. 23 feature films with budgets of £500k or more started principal photography in the UK during this period, the lowest number since 2005 (Table 1).

Source: UK Film Council

The number of UK domestic features (those made by a UK production company and produced wholly or partly in the UK) and inward investment features (those that are ‘substantially financed and controlled from outside the UK, where the production is attracted to the UK because of script requirements, the UK’s infrastructure or UK tax incentives’) both fell from the level seen in 2009. On the positive side, the decline in UK co-production activity appears to have stabilised, for the time being at least.

The money spent in the UK on making these features stood at £426.5 million, which is considerably lower than the amount spent in 2009 (£485.1 million), but remains higher than the levels of previous years (Table 2).

Source: UK Film Council

Honouring their commitment to provide market intelligence specifically about UK independent films, the UK Film Council reports 2010 saw less activity than in recent years (Table 3), although this is ‘principally due to the decline in co-productions’.

Source: UK Film Council

Interestingly, the median budget of UK independent films (£3.0 million) was higher during the first quarter of 2010 than it has been for some time (between 2007 and 2009 the figure hovered around £1.9 million). This is due to the fact that four of the 18 UK indie features had budgets over £5 million.

The report ends with a projection of full year production activity based on Q1 results. The UK Film Council tentatively suggests the year could see UK production spend hit £907 million in 2010, making it ‘one of the better years on record’.

Given the hefty contribution of inward investment activity to this total, much will depend on the continued attractiveness of the UK as a production base for US studio productions; and the outcome of the general election may prove influential. If we're to believe the pundits, a hung Parliament may further weaken the pound on the international currency markets, and a stronger dollar makes the UK more attractive for inward investment features.

While on the subject of the election, Labour is the only party to mention film explicitly in their manifesto. ‘The strength of Britain’s film industry’, we’re told, ‘is a source of pride'. Labour has committed to maintain the film tax credit and to proceed with the BFI/ UK Film Council merger. In other words, business as we've come to expect it, except of course there’ll be a lot less public money available for film over the next Parliament.

Meanwhile, neither the Liberal Democrats nor the Conservatives mention film in their manifestos, which is hardly surprising given all the urgent matters of State requiring attention (in which context, Labour’s manifesto reference is all the more remarkable).

The Liberal Democrats talk of safeguarding the future of ‘Britain’s creative industries’ by ‘supporting upgrades to our digital infrastructure and taking action to tackle illegal file-sharing’, and of fostering ‘an environment in which all forms of creativity are able to flourish’. This will be principally by means of a Creative Enterprise Fund offering ‘training, mentoring and small grants or loans to help creative businesses get off the ground’. But past evidence suggests getting creative businesses off the ground is rarely a problem- it's keeping them afloat and thriving that proves challenging.

The Conservative manifesto makes only glancing reference to ‘arts and heritage’, but not film per se. This is disappointing, especially given publication late last year of Maud Mansfield’s ‘Report on the British Film Industry for Shadow DCMS’. It's a rather admirable document, both balanced and well-researched.

Alas, none of it found its way into the main manifesto, which talks of ‘making Britain a European hub for hi-tech, digital and creative industries’ (whatever that means). We do know the Conservatives plan to scrap the Regional Development Agencies, which will affect the Regional Screen Agencies whom they co-fund and, therefore, support for film in England.

There's little point in speculating further about future film policy. We'll know more next week...

More on East Midlands investments

Last October I posted about the East Midlands Media Investments Fund (EMMI), as featured in EM Media's review of Economic Achievements 2008/09, which I was covering at the time.

Just last week EM Media and the East Midlands Development Agency announced a further round of EMMI investments, totalling over half a million pounds, including four feature films (The Brutal Game, Oranges and Sunshine, Tyrannosaur and The Weekender), a feature documentary (AnDa Union), TV development (Over the Hill and Under Cover), a documentary short (PS, Your Mystery Sender), a Facebook application (GangstaPets), and an online game (Natural Born Racer).

A tenth project will be announced shortly, and EM Media anticipates these investments will together deliver over 90 jobs, generating around £13 million for the East Midlands economy. This latest round of support brings EM Media's total to 37 feature films, 75 short films, 15 TV and 15 games and interactive investments to date.

Further information, including details of the talent involved in the funded projects, can be found on EM Media's web site.

UK films at the world box office in 2009

Figures released by the UK Film Council show the UK's share of world box office gross fell to its lowest level since records began in their present form in 2002 (Figure 1). As the chart makes clear, it's a wildly fluctuating picture year-on-year, driven by the performance of a small number of big hits.

UK films grossed around $2 billion in 2009, a 6.7% share of the total global theatrical market, down from 15.1% in 2008 when The Dark Knight, Quantum of Solace and Mamma Mia! topped the rankings (Table 1).

The highest grossing UK films in 2009 were led by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Slumdog Millionaire and Sherlock Holmes.

The UK Film Council expects UK market share to climb again in 2010, courtesy of some big inward investment feature releases during the year (starting with Clash of the Titans, which opens in April in most territories, and ending with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I as the year closes).

Figure 1: UK films global market share 2002 to 2009 (click to enlarge)

Sources: MPAA, Screen Digest, UK Film Council

Table 1: Top three UK films at the global box office, 2002 to 2009

Sources: MPAA, Screen Digest, UK Film Council             *still on release as at 25 March 2010

New data: film on UK TV

On the day the BBC Trust published the BBC Executive's strategic proposals for the corporation (which represent either a radical shake-up or mere window dressing, depending on who you believe), the UK Film Council published its annual overview of film on UK television.

To be strictly accurate, the stats cover only the five terrestrial channels and not those available for free or by subscription via cable, satellite or digital platforms.

Nonetheless, the picture is an interesting one - especially given its impeccable timing.

The UK Film Council report reveals a total of 2,218 films were shown on the five main network channels in 2009, much the same figure as in 2008. Channel 4 scheduled the most (561) and BBC1 brought up the rear with 338 (see Table 1 and Figure 1, courtesy of the UK Film Council).

Just over one fifth (22%) of the total were British films (the proportion stood at 23% in 2008), and BBC 2 led the way with almost one in three films (32%) originating in the UK. That at least squares with the BBC Executive's proposal for BBC Two to 'cement its role as the principal showcase for UK films in which BBC Films has invested.'

Recent UK titles (those released theatrically in the 8 years prior to TV broadcast) accounted for 7% of all films broadcast. The proportion of recent UK films shown on the main networks has increased over the last eight years, rising from 3% in 2002. According to the UK Film Council, this

'reflects the increase in the total number of films produced in the UK over the last decade and the shortened window between theatrical and free-to-air TV broadcast for films funded by BBC Films and Film Four.'

Curiously I couldn't find any substantive reference to BBC Films in the corporation's strategy proposals (other than that previously mentioned), so I assume funding for feature production will continue at the present level (£12 million per annum). But the proposals announced today do make other references to the BBC's approach to film in future.

For one thing, the Beeb intends to reduce spending on imported programmes and films 'by 20%, capping it thereafter at no more than 2.5p in every licence fee pound.' Does that mean studio-backed and distributed UK/US inward investment features (which qualify as culturally British for the tax credit) will be exempt? I guess it depends on the definition of an import.

The BBC is planning to spend the money thus saved by investing in 'new original British content to replace the acquired programmes and films from abroad which will be significantly cut back as part of this strategy.' So perhaps BBC Films will get a boost to its budget, after all...

The strategy proposals don't just apply to programming. Under these plans, the BBC web site is facing some judicious pruning. In fact whole branches will be lopped off, including the /filmfestival page which has not been updated since 2007. And the main /film page will be shorn of 'generic content', to include instead only content 'which has featured on BBC programmes or content to which the BBC has added distinctive editorial value.'

Quite what that means in practice is anybody's guess. But if you feel moved to plead the case for more (or less) of Mark Kermode et al on the box/radio/web you have until 25 May to submit a response to the BBC Trust's consultation.

Lords and superheroes: saviours of British film?

Having waited diligently for nearly a year, there’s a certain irony in the fact that, now it has finally been published, I’m too busy to write a decent post about the Lords Communications Committee report into the British film and television industries.

Fortunately there’s not a great deal to say. It’s a perfectly respectable report of its kind, full of facts and opinion, plus the familiar spectacle of well-intentioned hand wringing and exhortation. Just the sort of narrative one would expect.

Trouble is, it’s all so familiar. In cinematic terms, the Lords report is not so much a sequel to previous Parliamentary enquiries (like the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee report on The British Film Industry 2002/03). It’s actually closer in spirit to a remake.

Not a slavish shot-for-shot copy, like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), or a pointless transposition like Stephen T. Kay’s Get Carter (2000). It’s more like James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) when held up against Delmer Dave’s 1957 original. Different, and not without merit, but the same.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Evidence was heard from many of the same witnesses, and the challenges besetting our home industry are well known and, it would appear, largely unchanging.

But I can’t help feeling an opportunity has been missed. The Lords Committee took nearly a year to arrive at its conclusions, and commendable though they are (extend the tax credit, outlaw camcording in cinemas, encourage more private investment in film production, invest more in training, secure greater support for British film by broadcasters etc.) I’d like to have seen evidence of more innovative thinking and some fresh voices in the public policy debate.

In short, I’d like to have seen a ‘reimagining’, not a remake; a report resembling the 21st Century Battlestar Galactica, not The Thomas Crown Affair (1999).

The Lords report is subtitled ‘Decline or opportunity?’, but there’s very little in it of real substance about future opportunities. The ‘coming of digital distribution could offer opportunities for a different distribution model’, states one of the report’s conclusions, but without any concrete detail about the form this might take, or how the British industry, as opposed to the US studios, might benefit. The Lords report simply echoes the earlier Commons report observation that digital technology will have a transformative effect on the business. And…?

On another tack, there’s an example of alternative thinking in the latest issue of Screen International, where Slingshot CEO Arvind Ethan David speculates on the lessons the British film industry might learn from Marvel Entertainment’s strategy of superhero franchise-building.

I don’t know whether the case has genuine merit (when I read the article, Stormbreaker [2006] came to mind, a British property made and distributed by UK indies that failed to take off as a franchise). But it’s surely worth considering within the public policy mix, along with other more radical perspectives that would benefit from an airing once in a while.

UK film production in 2009, and US tax incentives in passing

In addition to publication last week of the UK’s annual box office and admissions totals, the UK Film Council released a slew of production data for 2009.

The press release accompanying the report (Film production in the UK – Full Year 2009 Report) carries the words ‘mixed’ and ‘fortunes’ in the title, which seems about right.

For while the UK benefited from £752.7 million of inward investment feature spend in 2009, pushing total spend for the year to £956.9 million (up 56% on 2008’s total), domestic feature and co-production activity was far less impressive.

The production of domestic features contributed £169.2 million to the total spend for the year, down from £207.2 million in 2008 (Figure 1). Meanwhile spend on UK co-productions amounted to a miserly £35 million, barely enough to pay for half an hour of Avatar’s runtime. UK 'co-producers', a species under threat, must surely know how the Na’vi feel.

Figure 1: UK spend of features produced in the UK, 2003 - 2009, £ millions

Source: UK Film Council

The overall number of UK productions has been remarkably consistent over the last three years. 125 features with budgets over £500k were made in 2009, compared with 126 in 2008 and 127 in 2007. But it’s a far cry from the heady days on 2003, when cameras rolled on 196 productions, over half of which were co-productions (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Number of features produced in the UK, 2003 - 2009

Source: UK Film Council

Although the number of co-productions held steady at 22 in 2009, the level remains at a historic low, ‘a function of the one flaw in the otherwise excellent film tax credit’, according to the UK Film Council, ‘which disincentivises UK participation in co-productions by focusing tax relief on production spend made on the ground in the UK.’

This idea of the unintended (and unwelcome) consequences of fiscal policy also surfaces in a ‘Special Report’ on US movie production incentives (MPIs) issued earlier this month by the Tax Foundation, a US-based ‘nonpartisan educational organization’.

The Foundation favours broad-based, low level taxation and is firmly opposed to tax credits and incentives for particular industries. So the report’s indictment of MPIs (described in the title as ‘Blockbuster Support for Lackluster Policy’) is hardly surprising. ‘While broad-based tax competition often benefits consumers and spurs economic growth and development’, writes report author William Luther, ‘industry-specific tax competition transfers wealth from the many to the few. Movie production incentives are costly and fail to live up to their promises’.

For me, the more startling realisation is that MPIs are now so widespread in the US. In Europe, and in many other parts of the world where home markets are dominated by US studio product, we’re quite used to public money supporting the local industry. But I had no idea of the number of US states offering tax and other incentives for feature production. Back in 2002 only five states offered MPIs. Since then, 39 other states have joined the party (in what Luther terms the ‘arms race of incentives’), including Hollywood’s home state of California.

Interestingly enough, FilmLA has recently credited the California Film and Television Tax Credit with easing the annual rate of decline in location shoots in the state. According to numbers released last week, on-location feature film production in Los Angeles fell by 29.9% in 2009, ‘the steepest year- over-year decline since tracking began in 1993’, although production activity rose in the final quarter of the year thanks to ‘incentive-driven production’ (the film incentive scheme came on stream in July 2009). In light of data such as these, the scrabble for production dollars is only likely to intensify and MPIs are bound to figure prominently for some time to come.

Video Business closes, sneak peak UK boffo 2009, UKFC research in the spotlight

This year’s first post is something of a hodgepodge. A sudden flurry of blogworthy stories has settled like the first dusting of snow, doubtless a precursor to the blizzard of year-end box office and admissions announcements we can expect over the coming days.

I’ll begin on a sombre note, with news that Video Business ceased publication last week, as owner Reed Business Information (which also owns Variety) offloads its US business-to-business titles. Video Business has been covering the home entertainment market for nearly thirty years, charting every up and down and shake of the dice. It will be missed chiefly because home entertainment market data are not as ubiquitous as box office numbers, and informed commentary carries a premium in such circumstances (though clearly not one that pays in the long-run...).

Onto more uplifting news, and last week The Independent profiled Tim Richards, CEO of Vue Entertainment in the UK. The article makes for interesting reading, touching as it does a range of topics including the company's digital cinema plans, 3D's gathering momentum and the lack of brand awareness among multiplex visitors ("It pains me to say this," admits Richards, "but 65% to 75% of people leaving the cinema can't tell you the name of it. They can tell you about the services but not the name").

We also learn, in passing, that the UK box office totalled £1.05 billion in 2009, up 11% on 2008. That’s according to UK Film Council figures due for ‘official’ publication on 19 January. The blizzard starts here.

While on the subject of the UK Film Council, the Research & Statistics Unit has just published findings of a user survey it ran last autumn. The timing couldn’t be better, because just before Christmas the organisation was criticised by Colin McCabe for publishing statistics that ‘tend to reflect rather too well on the Council’.

In an ‘anti-New Labour polemic’ published by Prospect magazine (and reproduced in full on McCabe’s blog), the academic and former Head of the BFI Production Board calls, among other things, for the UKFC to hand over its research function to the BFI.

Yet there’s little evidence in the survey report to suggest that users consider the UKFC’s research activity to be self-serving. If anything, the 400+ users who responded to the survey are, by and large, satisfied (and in many cases very satisfied) with the RSU’s work and publications. Self-serving or not, the RSU provides a service that others value. And that is as it should be.

2009: a year in rear view

So how was it for you? As 2010 gambols into view, like a newly minted foal, it seems only polite to ask.

For my part, I’ve been wondering these last few days whether 2009 was especially significant for the film business. It’s probably too early to say, and in any case every year is one of highs and lows, winners and losers. The one just past is no different.

On the strength of available evidence, it’s probably fair to say 2009 was not a singularly momentous year for the film biz. But it did bear witness to a number of watershed moments, and the question of its lasting significance will only be answerable in years to come.

We can say with certainty that theatrical exhibition in many parts of the world has fared well in 2009, further evidence that cinemagoing can be remarkably resilient even in the teeth of a recession (a point made in a paper published by the UK Film Council back in September 2008).

What role did 3D play in all of this? There’s an interesting study to be done to find out the answer (any takers?). 2009 saw the long-heralded relaunch of 3D courtesy of the digital cinema roll out across the globe, and the extra dimension gave movie theatres an added advantage over home entertainment (which makes it my Watershed Moment #1). It’s difficult to predict how long this advantage will last (3D TVs are in development, we’re told) and it remains to be seen whether the premium ticket prices charged to 3D goggle wearers will be sustainable once the novelty wears off.

While we’re on the subject of exhibition, I must mention the Splendor Cinema blog (my Find of the Year #1), which is dedicated to the exhibition business and written by Jon Barrenchea, General Manager of the Duke of York's Picturehouse in Brighton.

With cinema cash registers ringing fulsomely throughout 2009, there’s a certain irony in the fact that the year also saw more concerted experimentation with release windows by the major studios. Exhibitors have resisted any encroachment on the theatrical window, and the studios have contented themselves by playing around with various combinations of home entertainment windows, shuffling VoD and DVD releases on certain titles (Watershed Moment #2). But as trade journalist Diane Garrett reports in her Consumed by Media blog (Find of the Year #2), it may be only a matter of time before the theatrical window comes under renewed pressure.

Online piracy continued to loom large in 2009, despite the high-profile prosecution of Pirate Bay. But faced with dwindling finance from traditional sources and a theatrical market place dominated by expensively marketed studio pictures, independent filmmakers turned in increasing numbers to the digital sphere for production funding and DIY distribution opportunities.

To paraphrase Churchill, 2009 did not mark the end of old way of making and distributing films, and it was not even the beginning of the end. But it was, perhaps, the end of the beginning (a Watershed Moment #3 of sorts; Mark Anderson, writing recently in Wired, certainly thinks so).

The global banking crisis, the explosion of social networking, audience fragmentation, digital media convergence, the rise of multi-platform story-telling, the profusion of free online content and rampant file sharing: individually and collectively they pose a challenge to the status quo, as well as untold opportunities for those less wedded to the Twentieth Century way of doing things.

So much for the bigger picture. Here’s a quick run down of my highlights from the year’s posts:

January, February and March
At the top of the year some video game suit claimed ‘video games are poised to eclipse all other forms of entertainment in the decade ahead’. According to figures published only last week, it looks like he might have a point, at least in revenue terms. But it’s patent nonsense to suggest this makes video games more popular than film, a line some hacks have been touting in recent days.

It’s not only this kind of spurious logic we need to guard against in media coverage of the film business. As LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein reminded us in January, feature film budget numbers quoted in the media should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Or in Avatar’s case, perhaps a good handful.

The start of the year also saw the launch of a House of Lords enquiry into the British film and TV industries. The Lords Communications Committee took written and oral evidence throughout most of 2009, but there’s still no sign of their final report. Let's hope it's worth the wait.

2009 was a pleasingly fertile year for film business research sources, with the launch of several new web sites including Film New Europe in March, followed in June by Movie Review Intelligence and Marqeestars.com in September (Finds of the Year #3, #4 and #5). Be sure to check them out, if you’ve not done so already.

April, May and June
As previously noted, in 2009 it seemed we were never very far away from a piracy-related story, and in May an independent study by an academic research institute claimed to have established the size and impact of film and music piracy in the UK. Problem was the original press release included a wildly inaccurate figure, as pointed out by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian’s ‘Bad Science’ column. But that didn’t stop The Daily Mail, and others, running with the story.

In terms of the number of page views, by far the year’s most popular post concerned publication by the UK Film Council of Peter Bloore’s paper re-evaluating the independent film value chain (Find of the Year #6).

And around this time the UK Film Council also published a report into the cultural impact of UK film during the period 1946 to 2006 (the report can be downloaded as a PDF here) (a seminar was held to discuss the findings in November- presentations can be found on the UK Film Council web site).

July, August and September
July began encouragingly enough with publication by a couple of US academics of a paper about the use of film data to teach students basic business statistics.

But the big news in this period, certainly from a UK perspective, was of the proposed merger between the UK Film Council and the British Film Institute. I posted my initial thoughts on hearing the news, and was rewarded with an honourable mention in a Sight and Sound editorial. I duly renewed my subscription.

Critic and film writer Jason Solomons tried to kick off a debate about British films with his verdict that most of them are ‘crap’ (in a feature article for The Observer). Such is the lacklustre state of public discourse about film culture in this country that the article sparked nary a whimper in response. Did all of Solomons's readers simply shrug in resigned agreement? Where were the dissenting voices? Maybe he has has a point, after all.

October, November and December
Autumn greeted a new study of the European video on demand market, published by the European Audiovisual Observatory. The Observatory came up trumps again later in the year with publication of a detailed report into the Russian film business, prepared by Nevafilm and Rfilms (my Find of the Year #7)

A little late in the year, perhaps, for a silly season story, but news broke in November of a study estimating Kate Winslet’s financial value to the UK economy. We learned the actress is worth roughly £60 million to UK plc. If push comes to shove and the recession bites any deeper, I wonder how much we’d get for her on Ebay?

Better late than never, in December I finally found time to write up details of my favourite film-related infographics, an area of endeavour I plan to return to again in the coming year. There are many talented and generous people producing and freely sharing these fine works, and collectively they make my Find of the Year #8.

So there you have it, 2009 done and dusted. I look forward to welcoming you back in 2010.

The value of UK film imports and exports, 2008

Last year the film industry made a positive contribution to the UK's balance of trade totalling nearly £500 million, the highest net surplus since the Office for National Statistics (ONS) began collecting such data, according to figures released recently.

UK film industry exports totalled £1,341 million in 2008, up 28% on the previous year's total (Figure 1). The value of film imports stood at £846 million in 2008, 3% higher than in 2007. The film industry's contribution to the UK's balance of trade is calculated by subtracting imports from exports (= £495 million).

Figure 1: UK film exports, imports and balance of trade 2002 to 2008 (£ million)

Source: ONS

The largest proportion of the value of UK film exports (59%) came from royalties (including items like 'rights to use franchises, copyrights, licenses, patents and trademarks'), and the remainder came from production services (which includes film production and 'performances in cinemas or on television').

Figure 2: UK film exports 2002 to 2008

Source: ONS

The ONS bulletin also shows the USA accounted for 55% of UK film exports, the EU accounted for 26% and Asia 7%.

This is the final year the UK film and television survey will be run in its present form by ONS. From next year data will be collected through the ONS's International Trade in Services (ITIS) survey.

Australian feature film production 2008/09

Australia witnessed a surge in production activity last year (2008/09), with a sharp rise in budget expenditure according to results of the latest annual National Survey of Feature Film and TV Drama Production published earlier this month by Screen Australia.

In 2008/09, a total of AUS$358 million was spent in Australia on feature film production (with total budget expenditure of AUS$393 million), up from AUS$170 million in 2007/08. The increase was driven by two big-budget local productions, Zack Snyder's Guardians of Ga’Hoole and Happy Feet 2. The 2008/09 tally is also higher than the rolling five-year average of AUS$194 million.

During the year, 32 Australian features and co-productions began shooting in Australia, which marks a decrease from 38 productions in 2007/08 (but is on a par with the rolling five-year average of 32). A list of the feature film titles included in the Survey can be found here.

Australian productions (defined as those 'under Australian creative control' where 'the key elements are predominantly Australian and the project was originated and developed by Australians', including projects 'under Australian creative control that are 100 per cent foreign financed') accounted for 91% of all productions in the year (29 out of 32) and 95% of Australian expenditure (AUS$365 million out of AUS$358 million).

83% (24 out of 29) Australian productions fell within a budget range of AUS$6 million and under, much the same level as the five-year average.

Three co-productions shot in Australia in 2008/09 (At World’s End [Australia/Germany], The Boys Are Back [Australia/UK] and unofficial Australian/US co-production Beauty and the Beast), with Australian expenditure totalling AUS$17 million. This is lower than in the previous year, when five co-productions shot in Australia with local expenditure totalling AUS$49 million. 

The Survey helpfully identifies sources of finance for 2008/09 productions:

• 13 (41%) were financed 'principally by Australian film/TV industry sources, including cashflow against the Producer Offset where it was reported as part of the film’s production finance';
• 11 (34%) were financed 'substantially from direct government sources (primarily Screen Australia, although this also included the state agencies, and the Adelaide and Melbourne Film Festival Funds)';
• 7 (22%) were financed 'principally from foreign sources' (including all three co-productions and four local titles); and
• One (3%) film was financed 'substantially from private sources'.

Source: Screen Australia

In terms of the proportion of total finance from each source, government sources accounted for 9% (AUS$35 million), foreign sources provided 57% (AUS$224 million), Australian film/TV sources ponied up 33% (AUS$130 million) and private sources contributed 1% (AUS$5 million).


Source: Screen Australia

Despite the apparent strength of production activity in 2008/09, it is noteworthy that earlier this week the Screen Producers Association of Australia (SPAA) asked the Australian government for additional support to the tune of AUS$84 million over three years, in an effort to attract institutional investors for feature production (Screen Daily has the story). SPAA maintains the Producer Offset (PO) is not working as envisaged, and extra support is required in the current financial climate.

In contrast, Screen Australia takes encouragement from its Survey findings. “This is an important result for the industry,” Ruth Harley (Screen Australia’s Chief Executive) is quoted as saying in the press release announcing the findings. “2008/09 was the first full year of operation for the Producer Offset, and while a single year’s data makes it difficult to attribute the strong level of Australian production to the effect of the Offset alone, the outlook is encouraging, particularly considering the financial uncertainty that characterised 2008/09".

The debate about whether PO is working or not is set to continue, providing a great example of the way market data can figure in public policy decision making. Within this context, one measure of a competitive film industry (to use the UK Film Council's term) is the level of private investment it can attract on a consistent basis, although as far as I'm aware no state agency anywhere in the world has publicly committed itself to a data collection regime and a set of targets that would put such a metric into practice in any meaningful way. If anyone out there has any thoughts or practical suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Incidentally, the National Survey of Feature Film and TV Drama Production also provides data on foreign features shot in Australia,  Australian TV drama production activity and income from post, digital and visual effects (PDV) services.