Bigger Picture Research

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.”

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.

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 indie film value chain

Whenever anyone talks at any length, and with serious intent, about the film business you can almost guarantee at some point in the conversation reference will be made to the ‘film value chain’. I use the term myself, as shorthand to describe the different life stages of a film, from production through to exploitation across a variety of windows.

Turns out that’s not entirely wrong, but it is also not entirely correct, either; and perhaps more importantly,  the original thinking behind the term ‘value chain’ was intended to have analytical, as well as descriptive, application.

I recently discovered this courtesy of a paper by Peter Bloore (Re-defining the Independent Film Value Chain), published last week by the UK Film Council.

Teaching aid

The author certainly knows his onions. Bloore was formerly Associate Director of the Film Business Academy at Cass Business School, and he developed a model of the independent film value chain for use as a teaching aid. 

The 'value chain' concept was originally popularised by business strategist Michael Porter in his book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (1985). It has subsequently been adopted by academics and business commentators writing in connection with the film business. But as Bloore points out, ‘there have been few attempts to accurately codify the chain and explore its complexity, especially within the independent sector.’ His fascinating paper is a welcome step in this direction.

Independent thinking

Starting with a review of the relevant literature, Bloore argues that existing attempts at modelling the film value chain are too simplistic, and tend to favour the Hollywood studio modus operandi (by, for example, collapsing development, financing and production into one ‘link’ in the chain).

Why is this important? Well, the point about the value chain approach is that it seeks to depict how value is added at every stage within a chain from initial inception through to consumption. It follows that if the model doesn’t adequately capture the different stages and players operating at each point in the chain, the result is only a partial picture of value creation.

This is a particular issue with so many players involved in bringing an indie film to market (see the model, below). Bloore notes that the term ‘value system’ is more appropriate to describe independent feature film and distribution because the product ‘is not made and delivered to its final audience by a single company’. Nonetheless, his model retains the term ‘value chain’ in concert with prevailing usage.

Click to enlarge:

Source: Bloore (2009); Re-defining the Independent Film Value Chain (reproduced with kind permission)

Players and consumers

Bloore’s model has a number of unique characteristics. For one thing, he includes a list of ‘players’ to show the range ‘of private and public organisations and freelance individuals involved’ at each stage. This enables the model to be read ‘in terms of creative value and influences, as well as financial value and investment.’ It’s also a great primer for anyone unfamiliar with the roles and responsibilities of those involved at each stage.

And unlike previous models, Bloore has chosen to include the consumer as a link in the chain. Consumers add value by purchasing film products (thereby ‘allowing financial value to return down the chain’) and by establishing a film’s reputation through consumption, word of mouth etc. ‘In this way,’ he notes, ‘the consumer could be argued to be participating and adding value, rather than merely consuming’. I must admit I’m not clear whether Bloore is suggesting that film consumers are different to consumers of other products (don’t people who buy baked beans help to establish future demand through brand loyalty, word of mouth etc.?). I can't tell whether inclusion of the consumer in the value chain is something that sets film apart from other products, or if it is a more general refinement that can be applied to other industries. But that is by the bye.

Social marketplace

Bloore set out to codify the existing independent film value chain, deliberately avoiding any undue speculation about the impact of digital technology, media convergence and the economic downturn on the model. But in characterising the likely shape of this debate about the future he contrasts two views. The first sees little impact of new technology on the value chain, while the second, advanced in a forthcoming publication by Angus Finney, predicts the greater involvement in earlier production stages of 'end-users such as cinema owners and chains, pay-TV operators and even video game operators', with the result that those involved in 'third party distribution' may be cut out completely. 

In thinking about the future, it occurs to me that the model may need to account for the role of consumers as finance and development partners, through the growth of crowdsourcing schemes and ventures like Indie GoGo, 'the social marketplace where filmmakers and fans connect to make independent film happen'.

'Online, a significant segment of the audience no longer wants to just consume. They want to collaborate', writes Scott Kirsner in Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age. If such methods become more commonplace (and there is good reason to believe they will) it may be appropriate to include consumers at an earlier stage in the model, and not just at the end. 

Long tail

Bloore also includes the exploitation of library rights in his model, marking a further departure from previous approaches:

‘Library and re-issue rights are potentially an area of extra value for film and television programmes compared to some other media products (especially newspapers and magazines); partly because of the long shelf life of a successful film and partly because the distribution of the completed product is generally licensed, rather than carried out by the originating company (with the exception of American studio and European mini studio / broadcaster product).’

Risky business

Although it goes beyond the original intention behind Porter’s value chain specification, Bloore’s model helps to illustrate the principle that ‘the earlier (further to the left) you are in the chain (towards development and production) the higher the potential risk for the capital investor, due to the distance in the recoupment chain from the money paid by the consumer’. Which is another argument for the use of soft money to support development, through public agencies like the UK Film Council; and returning to my suggestion about consumer involvement through social marketplaces, one can see how such schemes can help to address risk by short-circuiting the chain.

The model comes into its own as an analytical and strategic tool, not only by clarifying a complex system of relationships, but by highlighting the types of challenges facing those involved in indie production and distribution:

‘These include the large number of collaborating individuals and organisations; the complexity of the multi-player independent financing process (making it prone to setbacks when even one player drops out); the separation of the producer from the distribution and marketing process; the vacillating power of the writer; and the fact that lawyers and accountants appear to have the most stable jobs in the industry (because they can earn money at every stage of the value chain).’

What do you think?

In the space of a blog post I can’t do justice to the full breadth of Bloore’s thinking (his paper also explores the merits or otherwise of vertical and horizontal integration, as well as offering an appraisal of the limits of value chain analysis).

But I can say that if, like me, you’ve ever used the term ‘value chain’ without due consideration to its technical meaning and application then this paper is well worth a read. Bloore is keen to see the model discussed and debated, and it’s great to see the UK Film Council providing a platform for this kind of initiative. Whatever your interest, Bloore’s contact details appear on the paper if you wish to discuss the model directly with the author, or feel free to leave a comment below.

Montage: French film production in 2008; PEVE Digital Entertainment conference; MPAA research 2008

Two items of interest emerged from Paris in the last couple of weeks, beginning with publication by the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) of data showing the strength and vitality of French film production in 2008.

Both the level of production and total production investment rose for the second year running, with the number of films made totalling 240 (up from 228 in 2007), backed by investment of 1.49 billion euros (1.22 billion euros from French sources, an increase of 29% on 2007).

According to a report in Variety, the economic slump had not taken effect by the time most 2008 movies went into production, and historically French film production has proved relatively resilient during financial downturns. Patrick Lamassoure, Film France managing director, is quoted as saying:
"The French production system isn't based on equity. Money doesn't come from banks; it comes principally from TV stations, CNC subsidy coin and minimum guarantees from domestic distributors.”

Last week also saw Paris play host to the annual Screen Digest PEVE Digital Entertainment conference. According to the press release, ‘the home entertainment industry has much to be optimistic about’, despite the economic downturn.

This upbeat assessment is based on facts and figures presented over the two days of the conference, which included a keynote address by David Bishop, President of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, who noted that home entertainment is a $50bn-a-year business that 'continues to be a critical revenue  stream for our parent companies' and that ‘consumers are still buying packaged media in significant numbers'. 

Screen Digest's Dan Cryan told delegates the biggest challenge they face is in persuading consumers to pay for content that is currently available for free. Piracy is not the only competition according to data presented by Cryan: by 2011, ‘ad-funded, free to view TV shows will account for 10 times more US consumption than paid-for online content. Both pricing and windowing strategies must be rethought...if paid-for content is to compete with free’.

Further details of what sounds like a really fascinating event can be found here.

Finally, Pamela McClintock, writing in Variety earlier in the week, offers some interesting speculation as to why the MPAA’s annual theatrical market data publication has not yet surfaced.

‘So far’, she reports, ‘the 2008 report is missing in action despite the fact that it was a record-breaking year at both the domestic and international box office.’

McClintock suspects the MPAA ‘doesn't want to publicly tout the health of the box office during the economic crisis. Nor does [Dan Glickman, MPAA Chair and CEO] want to give Washington politicos ammunition. In January, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) blasted a provision in the stimulus package that would have provided $246 million in tax breaks for studios and filmmakers. Coburn's argument: Why should Hollywood get a handout when the box office is going gangbusters?’

But according to McClintock we won’t have to wait for much longer. The MPAA has confirmed the report is due for publication online following Glickman's appearance at the ShoWest event next Tuesday.

(Now, far be it for me to indulge in my own conspiracy theories, but I note that ShoWest is run by the Nielsen Film Group, part of the Nielsen Company that also owns The Hollywood Reporter, a rival to  Variety...is that what stoked McClintock's interest?).

DIY distribution: the emperor’s virtual clothes?

Yesterday I was pleased to attend Power to the Pixel’s Digital Distribution and Film Innovation Forum in London. It was an excellent event: lively, engaging and informative. The line-up was varied and the speakers came across as articulate, intelligent and very, very capable individuals who have managed, by hook or by crook, to bring their creative vision to the masses, or help others to do so.

But…there’s always a but (the proctologists’ motto). As I mentioned in my last post, I went to the event in the hope of finding evidence (i.e. concrete, tangible, bite-me-on-the-bum, QED hard data) of a self-distribution business model capable of creating sustainable enterprises. And I have to say, though it pains me to do so, I came away disappointed.

Digital technology has definitely delivered on its promise of democratising production. No doubt about it. But so far it has fallen short of enabling filmmakers to generate sufficient amounts of cold, hard cash to develop businesses that can thrive in the medium to long-term.

Economic uncertainties

Last week’s volatility in the financial markets (is volatility the right word to describe a rout?) prompted a slew of stories about how recession-proof the movie industry is/is not (delete as applicable). I thought we’d dealt with the matter at the beginning of September, but apparently not. It keeps surfacing in one form or another.

Take, for example, a story prompted by a press release from US-based research outfit SNL Kagan. The release is entitled SNL Kagan Study Confirms That Hollywood Movies Still Thrive during Tough Times, and it’d be reasonable to assume this refers to the Tough Times we’re currently experiencing.

But the study looks at 2007, not 2008. So when analyst Derek Baine says, ‘When the going gets tough, consumers go to the movies. Historically, theaters have been fairly recession proof, and this year looks to be no exception’, it’s not exactly clear whether he’s talking about the situation in 2007, or projecting from his 2007 data to make a prediction about 2008.

Selling shorts short

It’s been quite a year for the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), the longest continually running film festival in the world. In March the UK Film Council announced it was awarding EIFF £1.88 million Lottery funding over the next three years, and the festival organisers also took the bold step to bring the date of the event forward to June, enabling it to step out of the shadow of the Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe in August and enjoy its own moment in the sun (or sunshine and showers as it turned out).

A recent lull in the publication of comment-worthy film research reports has given me a chance to check out some of the items I missed earlier in the year. Top of the list was the latest edition of Film UK Guide to British Film, which is published each year by EIFF as a hard copy insert in the delegate pack and as a PDF download.

The Guide has been around for fourteen years and you can download past editions going back to 2001 from the EIFF web site. It is essentially a catalogue of UK feature films and shorts made in the twelve months prior to the festival (although one consequence of the festival’s change of date was to limit coverage of the 2008 Guide to ten months instead of the usual twelve).

The most interesting feature of the Guide, to my mind, is the section on short films. The latest edition has details of 278 shorts made in the UK between August 2007 and June 2008. What’s useful about the Guide is that unlike full-length feature films, no one currently tracks short film production in the UK so information about the scale, success and diversity of the shorts sector is impossible to come by. That’s a shame, not least because short films can provide new entrants with their first taste of filmmaking and the rough and tumble world of distribution.

Risk management: Public investment in film

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

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