Firstly this is an independent report setting out to the Westminster Government, the BFI and others recommendations which they may or may not choose to follow.  While the Scottish Government (and key bodies such as Creative Scotland or the NLS where the Scottish Film Archive now sits) have no formal obligation to pay it any heed, it nonetheless has great significance for film in Scotland, from education and training to production, exhibition and archive as it both sets out key issues and challenges and some of the means by which they might be addressed.  In doing so it has the potential to bolster the case made by various interest groups (not always entirely shared) – from educators to exhibitors – for funding and other interventions.

The Review has direct implications for how the BFI may relate in future to Creative Scotland and other Scottish bodies and, in passing, it prompts not a few questions abut how a future Independent, or at least fiscally independent, Scotland would manage some of the matters which are currently reserved to the UK such as tax breaks for film production, the treatment of co-productions and so on.  (Indeed what the role of the BFI might be post independence or devo-max is an interesting but so far entirely unexamined question.)  In its submission to the Review the Scottish Government, amongst other things, called for film lottery funding to be fully delegated to Scotland and suggested that the BFI could also be made accountable to the Scottish Parliament for its activities in Scotland.

Back to the report then and amidst the welter of recommendations on treatment of producer’s equity, piracy, integration of film education and closer working between producers and distributors (now where have we heard that before? Oh yes, in 1997 when the Lottery Film Franchises were established…or even further back in 1980… plus ca change)  there are some which have specific significance for Scotland, vis:

Recommendation 6. (“The Panel recommends that the BFI should co-ordinate a joined-up UK-wide film festival offer, to promote independent British and specialised film and maximise value for money, utilising a mix of public funding and private investment and sponsorship.”) though it doesn’t mention it by name,  implies the continuing  importance of the Edinburgh International Film Festival to the UK film festival ecology but stresses the need for more to be done ‘to understand the role of local festivals and their relationship to international festivals in the UK’.  Growing festivals like Glasgow’s may take heart from that whereas Edinburgh may need to consider what role it wants to play as Scotland‘s centre of excellence in festival programming, curation and so on outside of the few weeks of the Festival itself.

Several commentators have highlighted the Review’s veiled criticism of UK Broadcasters for not doing enough to support the film ecology it benefits from to the tune  of £1.2bn in ‘economic value’ and the fact that 80% of UK film’s audience is via television.  While it resists calling outright for the statutory quotas for film investment or output which are common in outher parts of Europe, it does dangle them as a plan B if a voluntary solution isn’t found: “the Government initiates immediate discussions with each of the major broadcasters – the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and BSkyB – with the aim of agreeing a Memorandum of Understanding with each broadcaster setting out its agreed commitments to support British film. Should this approach prove unproductive, then the Government should look at legislative solutions, including new film-related licence requirements to be implemented in the new Communications Act.”

From a Scottish perspective the question is whether such voluntary or statutory arrangements can produce a commitment to diversity of material and/or a specific commitment to film investment/output in Scotland by the terrestrial broadcasters.  Given the current scale of opt-out programme budgets and available slots this might seem implausible but STV’s drive to opt out of the ITV network more and more, the declining ‘entry cost’ of (low budget) feature film production, wider partnership opportunities with domestic and overseas co-producers and the greater flexibility over release ‘windows’ all make it much easier to envisage Scottish broadcasters part-funding festures for theatrical and near to simultaneous TV release.  Indeed without them it is difficult to imagine a sustainable Scottish film ecology.

Alongside finance and distribution, skills and talent development are crucial to the ‘supply side’ of film-making.  Sustaining the critical mass of craft skills in Scotland needed to support incoming and indigenous filmmaking and nurturing new talent to the point where it can attract investment from near or far remain high priorities (or ought to).  The Smith Review Panel “recommends that the BFI, in partnership with Skillset and BIS, continues to deliver and strengthen a strategy for skills which represents a ‘gold standard’. Such a strategy will help ensure that skills across the sector remain one of the UK’s great strengths, that our skills base continues to act as a powerful incentive for inward investment, and that the indigenous film sector is able to maximise benefits to audiences.”

Our own research has recently uncovered a worrying downward trend in film skills investment in Scotland over the past five years both in absolute terms (due to the cuts in funding to UK skills body Skillset) but also in percentage terms as the ‘centre’ of the industry has been, relatively speaking, protected.

Skillset Nations and regions spend

The Smith Review recognizes the ‘National and Regional Challenge’, noting that “Despite support for out-of-London film activities from National and Regional screen agencies, the UK film industry remains a London-centric business [which] presents challenges for the development of talent and on-screen representation of the UK’s Nations and Regions.”

In recommendation 44 Smith “recommends that the BFI works with and supports Creative England, the National Screen Agencies, Skillset and others to create a strategy to ensure diverse talent is found, supported and nurtured, outside of London. Ways should be found to help ensure that talented people can work, in a sustainable way, wherever they may wish to locate themselves in the UK.”

Fine words though there is not much flesh on them in the report itself.  That said one of the concrete recommendations with a potential direct impact in Scotland (here I must declare an interest as Director of Screen Academy Scotland) relates to film schools:

“42. The Panel recommends that the BFI, together with Skillset, HEFCE and the Scottish Funding Council, undertakes a review of the three Skillset Film Academies, with the objective of establishing their readiness to be considered for the equivalent of ‘Conservatoire’ status for delivering world-class skills and training – similar to that enjoyed by leading music, drama and dance academies.”

Since we established Screen Academy Scotland in 2005, transforming the opportunities for film talent to pursue postgraduate, practice-based training in a well resourced, creative and risk-taking space, the goal of sustained funding at a per capita level commensurate with e.g, the National Film and Television School, has remain frustratingly close but just out of reach.  This recommendation by the Smith Review, if heeded, may finally help us close the gap and ensure that the nation’s film and television school does not have to live from hand to mouth, chasing funding on an annual basis.

All in all the Smith Review has much for filmmakers, educators, audiences and policymakers to welcome but of course the real test is what notice the Government(s) and BFI (whose own strategy is due out in a month or so) take of its recommendations and how much pressure is effectively brought to bear on them by the diverse (and largely disparate) interests that make up the audience for this report.

First up, three decades of concerted effort to nurture ‘new talent’ and expand production has certainly produced more debut features: three times as many in the 2000s as in the 1980s (though a distinct drop from the ‘high watermark’ decade of the 1990s).  But despite much talk of nurturing ‘young film-makers’, the average age of first time feature directors remains stubbornly above forty (although it did dip slightly in the 1990s) suggesting that it is no easier to acquire the credibility that unlocks investment now than it was twenty tears ago.

Gender-wise things have certainly improved since the 1980s (they couldn’t get any worse!) such that by the ‘noughties’ 30% of first time directors were women but that leaves plenty of room for improvement.  As for ethnicity, well suffice it to say that out of around 150 films only Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006) can truly claim to have foregrounded an ethnic minority community in its narrative, one directed by Londoner Pratiba Parmar.

* – median age based on those directors for whom date of birth information was available.

However, the most dramatic change evident is the proportion of films which are co-productions, having risen from zero in the eighties to 37% in the noughties, (almost without exception all of these co-produced with other European countries).  This is consistent with the general trend towards co-production in Europe arising from the growth of soft-monies, location incentives, risk-exchange across territories. And it no doubt also reflects a greater level of international awareness and stronger networks amongst producers here and across the North and Irish Seas.  (Something which is now part of the aspiring producer’s curriculum at our very own Screen Academy Scotland for example).  Over the past decade Germany has been easily the most popular partner (10 films) followed by Ireland (4) and Denmark (3).

But the most worrying figure remains simply the total number of features being made. As we have pointed out at length elsewhere there is little to no chance of securing more critically or commercially successful films without an absolute increase in the volume of production.  Thus far the 21^st century has seen a reversal of the decade on decade growth evident between the 1980s and the 1990s so we have some ground to make up even to simply match the output of the 1990s.  That will require sustained, increased investment and in part two of this series we look at what the record shows there.

Less anyone imagines these are just minor technical tweaks  it is worth noting that as a result of the latest changes to the methodology the reported Gross Value Added (GVA) of the UK’s creative industries has plummeted by nearly 50% from £59bn (5.6% of the total) in 2008 to £36bn (2.89%) in 2009!

What this in fact means is that if the current methodology is taken as accurate, the previous statistics were grossly exaggerating the real value of the Creative Industries but we can breathe a sigh of relief as the new figures can be relied on ‘going forwards’.

One of the biggest (and long overdue) revisions concerns the value of software and games which at £26.4bn (46% of the CI total) on the ‘old’ system dwarfed every other sector.  In the new figures, which have stripped out a swathe of ‘non creative’ software consultancy and the like, a more realistic figure of £160m for ‘Digital & entertainment Media’ and £570m for ‘Software and Electronic Publishing’ puts the combined total at 2% of the CI.

So which is UK’s biggest Creative Industry?  Well it may surprise some people to learn that it is Publishing, worth £11.6bn GVA in 2008 and accounting for a third of all CI GVA and almost the same proportion of exports at £2.6bn (in 2009). Advertising comes second at £7bn in 2008 but dropped to £6bn in 2009 as the recession took hold while TV & Radio are in third place at around £5bn.

What about Scotland?  Well the full range of data isn’t yet available but a few figures provide some clues as to what may be happening.  Scanning the regional breakdown of registered enterprises (NB this excludes a lot of sole traders) Scotland’s 4,800 creative businesses in 2011, 4.5% of the UK total, have pretty much held steady since 2009.  However there is significant variance by sub-sector with, for example, ‘digital media’ increasing by 100% and advertising by 11% while publishing was down 13% and software down 17%.  However these changes can be misleading: an increase in the number of businesses can mean a lot of new start-ups following the closure of a major employer.  Until we see the Scottish breakdown of turnover and GVA we won’t know.

Closer to home the statistical elves are working away on the past ten years of Lottery and other investment in Scotland’s screen sector and we will be analysing that in the New Year.  Happy Solstice!

Behind such concerns lies a deeper challenge to film schools – their very existence.  This fuelled the conference debate on the ‘fundamental values of films schools’. The growing popularity of the (very silly) idea that ‘all you need now to make a feature film is a camera and a laptop’ continues to sway even normally intelligent people and it has to be said that even film school staff can fall prey to technology fetishism.  The now very tired debate over ‘should we still be teaching using film as well as digital’ received yet another airing in Prague when the important question is not about the technology but about the methodology.  Film-making is about making creative choices within the means at your disposal – about what to film , where and when to film it, with whom, in what way, when to cut, when not to cut – in which what kind of technology to use is merely one choice.  Learning how to make those choices, experimenting, risking, failing, getting advice and feedback and learning from each other – these are the lessons learned in film school, not which buttons to press (though that is a necessary part of the process). With enough time, a manual and judicious use of Google  anyone can work out how to use a Digital SLR or an ARRI ALEXA. Using the same approach they are unlikely to have the same success casting two compatible actors, coaching believable performances or ensuring a team of five, ten or thirty pull together under pressure of time on a cold wet moor towards a common creative vision.  They are equally unlikely to be challenged about their values, forced out of their comfort zone or exposed to films they would never have chosen to watch themselves.

Yet given demand for places at film schools has by all accounts never been higher it may seem strange that such anxieties trouble at least some of the world’s film schools.  The explanation lies less in the attitude of young filmmakers, who still seem to appreciate what film school offers, but more in the attitude of public policy-makers who, swayed by the popular impression that ‘anyone can be a filmmaker now’, are questioning the value, and more specifically, the cost, of maintaining national film schools.  Those that are directly funded by culture or education ministries outside the university system feel exposed as ‘luxuries’ while those that are based within Universities are in some cases being pressured to drop their ‘small numbers, high quality’ approach to reduce costs.  The fashion for ‘teaching creative skills’ has overtaken ‘nurturing creative talent’ and engendered a ‘more=better’ approach by funding bodies. This, combined with the dead hand of educational homogenisation, is starting to squeeze the risk-taking out of film practice education in favour of a technocratic approach in which, it is presumed, armies of multi-skilled creative technicians will march into jobs in the expanding creative economy and save us from deindustrialisation.  There are good reasons to pursue aspects of this strategy in addition to what in music or drama is well understood as a ‘conservatoire’ approach,  But some countries have never even accepted that the centre of excellence idea might apply to more modern (albeit now a century old!) art forms such as cinema while in those that have, the pressure to conform to wider higher education norms and numbers is growing inexorably.

Here we should acknowledge a big caveat as what is described above is largely a European phenomenon.  The rest of the world is developing film schools fast and from Singapore to South Africa their growth is a symptom, perhaps, of the fact that with few exceptions a commercially and culturally successful film industry is rarely found without the influence of one or more film schools.  Europe’s film schools are increasingly partnering up with the rest of the world to promote international collaboration amongst both staff and students.  This year our own Screen Academy Scotland’s extension of its EU MEDIA funded ENGAGE programme to embrace participants from China and Canada is just one example with the EU’s MEDIA MUNDUS programme supporting several such projects.  As China, India and South Korea become global players in co-production and not just markets for Hollywood product, the opportunities for Europe’s new filmmakers to ‘think global, act local’ are expanding significantly and film schools are increasingly in the vanguard of brokering such relationships.  Whether they will be able to hold their end up, though, depends on their continuing to be valued as small-scale centres of excellence that  are an investment in long-term success and not short-term ‘outcomes’.

The purpose of my visit to Vicenza, home of the 16^th century genius Andrea Palladio whose Villa Rotunda has inspired great and not so great buildings around the world for half a millennium, was to talk about Scotland’s creative sector and strategies to city officials, artisans and academics (including the influential researcher and recent visitor to Edinburgh Napier, Prof. Pier Luigi Sacco)  involved in Fuoribiennale and Innovetionvalley.  These  projects are aimed at ensuring the sustainability of creative industries in a region which claims to possess “the highest degree of creativity in the world”.   (Slightly more objective analysis by the European Cluster Observatory suggests that while important, the Veneto is around 23^rd in the global league table of regions for creative and cultural employment clusters, with Paris Ile de France, Inner London and Milan holding the top three spots).

In certain key respects the Veneto region is not dissimilar to Scotland with a population of 5 million and GDP of €141 billion (Scotland’s is around €150bn). However it has a larger industrial base (33% of GVA to our 26%) and a smaller services sector (65% to our 74%) although the balance has shifted around 5% towards services over the last decade. Notably over 30% of the 458,000 businesses in the region are ”related to craftsmen” – an indication of the artisanal tradition that remains an important element in future economy development alongside the “high concentration of small and medium-sized enterprises highly specialised in a productive sector.”  This is after all the $3bn ‘world centre’ of tanning  – the leather in your shoe could well have come from the region, not to mention the shoe itself .  But it is the Veneto’s design-intensive and high valued-added clothing industry (evident in the success of global brands €1.3 billion Diesel and €2 billion Benetton) and the numerous design-led sectors such as glassware and ceramics which concerned the creative industries champions gathered in Vicenza.

The focal point of their effort is the conversion of the majestic Palladian Basilica in the very heart of Vicenza into an incubator for new creative businesses.  Following a €25m restoration the Municipality of Vicenza, working with academics from the University of Padova, hopes that the traditional skilled artisans of the region and a new generation of designers, artists and creative entrepreneurs will find a way to ensure the continued generation of creative design IP that can be manufactured in the region.  Their objective is to secure an international market for smaller companies without falling prey to the outsourcing which has become an industry in itself.  Helping artisan-based companies to develop marketing and media skills is one key objective, the thrust of which is:

“re-branding the North-East of Italy as a creative hub, far from the traditional manufacturing image. … The entire region is characterized by the existence of creative hubs – e.g. Venice – technological hubs – scientific and technological parks in Venice and Padova –, a thick population of emerging small firms in tertiary activities – communication, marketing, It – and a changing population of firms operating in the design, manufacturing and commercialization of a variety of Made in Italy products. These elements need to be connected coherently in order to communicate a new identity of the region to the relevant constituencies in Italy and on foreign markets”.  Source: Task Force on Using Excellent Clusters toAddress Emerging Industries.

While direct comparisons between Scotland and the Veneto or, say Edinburgh and Vicenza, are not straightforward the challenges facing the Venetian textile sector are perhaps analogous to those facing companies in the Scottish Borders while the desire to better connect the creative skills of service-oriented companies in advertising and digital media to IP-generating businesses in the cultural sector is shared by, for example, the recently re-launched Creative Edinburgh.

One of the most interesting aspects of the incubator project in Vicenza is the leading role of Fuoribiennale “an association of artists and creative professionals gravitating around the Biennale of contemporary art of Venice”.  It would be interesting to see a grouping of Scotland’s artists making common cause with say the Borders textile firms in pursuit of a creative-industries led regeneration strategy in Hawick, Jedburgh or Kelso though the existence of Borders Creative might well allow that to happen.  (Indeed there might be some useful mileage in the latter getting together with their opposite numbers in the Veneto to swap notes. )

My Italian interlocutors were most interested to know about Scotland’s experience of Creative Industry incubators , the short answer being in truth its difficult to say as no-one has really researched the topic.  Other research (see for example Jo Foord’s Strategies for creative industries:an international review)  suggests that, on their own, incubators may be of limited value, particularly if their underlying purpose is to stimulate a ‘creative cluster’ of businesses. Rather what really matters is a holistic approach to SMEs’ needs from start-up to sustainabilty.  While Scotland’s artists, creative practitioners and businesses may not exactly be breathless in anticipation of the Scottish Creative Industries Partnership detailed action plans,  they have the potential to be important step towards realization of the Government’s aspirations for a truly ‘joined-up’ strategy for the sector’s development.  Meantime when the works of the world’s cutting edge artists are packed up and sent home, the Venetian artists and artisans will be forging links in the home of one of the world’s greatest creatives.

The extraordinary Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the oldest surviving (indoor) theatre in the world and, alongside the Villa ‘Rotunda’, arguably the crowning achievement of Andrea Palladio, although he did not live to see it having died before it was completed in 1585.

The extraordinary Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the oldest surviving (indoor) theatre in the world and, alongside the Villa ‘Rotunda’, arguably the crowning achievement of Andrea Palladio, although he did not live to see it having died before it was completed in 1585.  True to the values of the Renaissance the founders of its sponsor, The Academy Olympia, saw no division between the arts, science and literature but viewed them as part of the same human endeavor.  Endowing a theatre was for them as important a contribution to understanding  the world as the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

One  might add that the BFI is not alone in that regard, the evidence base for film policy in Scotland has been scanty to say the least, indeed there hasn’t been any systematic research into the impacts or options for film policy here for over a decade. The closest we’ve got being the 2001 Scottish Executive Review of Scottish Screen and David Graham Associates ‘Audit of the Screen Industries in Scotland’ but as in other domains (see below) these tend to studiously ignore reviewing previous policy success or failure and are thus apt to neither learn from nor avoid repeating the same (mis)judegments.  There have of course been occasional and useful contributions to an otherwise largely absent ‘serious’ debate as distinct from under-informed invective.  These ranging in time and place from e.g. Mark Cousins writing in Vertigo and (then backbencher) Mike Russell reporting to Parliament  to contributions from the more academically inclined such as Duncan Petrie’s significant corpus of work on Scottish ciema which often touches on policy questions and myself (though I leave the usefulness of the latter for others to judge).

Back to the present and Jim Barret from Bigger Picture Research identified a key challenge to greater academic influence on the policy process – the disparity in timescales between policy formation, often measurable in months (or, in the case of the UKFC’s demise what appeared to be weeks) and securing funding for and completing academic research, which is more often measured in years.  Royal Holloway’s John Hill characterised the position of academic researchers as lying on a continuum ranging from ‘hired hand’ to ‘critical public agent’ – the latter ensuring that researchers maintained sufficient distance and disinterest to both ask and answer questions that might not always be the ones Government or public agencies want asked.

A little surprisingly, during the course of the day few seemed to feel that policy evaluation, as distinct from original research which might inform new policy areas, was a significant area of potential.  Compared to other fields such as health, criminal justice and so on, which are awash with evaluation projects, the results of successive film policies seems to go unchallenged.  To be fair John Hill did point out that every successive Government film policy seemed to adopt an ‘ab initio’ position, blithely ignoring the previous regime’s efforts.

NESTA’s creative industries director and former Lehman Brothers economist Hasan Bakhshi was less interested in what had or hadn’t worked in the past, preferring to focus on what he suggested were as yet largely unexplored methodological avenues.  ‘Experimental’ and ‘action research’ approaches could, he argued, yield more useful research outcomes, citing the example of NESTA’s work with the National Theatre on cinema broadcast relay of theatre performances.  He suggested there are insights not being brought to researching the film industry: “as an economist I’m particularly concerned at the lack of engagement of economics researchers with the film industry.”

One might challenge this assertion as there has certainly been quite a lot of work going on nationally and internationally, usefully summarised in Sydney University researcher Jordi McKenzie’s recent literature survey.  That said a contributor from the floor rightly observed that applied film industry research doesn’t tend to get you published in the mainstream international journals and thus gain the attendant quality ranking when exercises such as the Research Excellence Framework are conducted.  These are major concerns for up and coming as well as established academics.  As a potential corrective Bakhshi supported the idea of dedicated funding streams to support academic-film business research collaborations.

Turning in the next session to examples of successful collaborations, veteran film historian, curator and researcher Ian Christie, a leading light in 2009’s groundbreaking study ‘Stories we tell ourselves…’  gave a thoughtful and cogent summary of the ways in which his work has engaged with real world concerns. He gently berated the film studies research community for failing to properly engage with empirical methods which could generate the kind of evidence base to inform cultural as much as industrial policy debates, declaring “we’ve had too little quantitative and too much qualitative” work.

Screenwriter and former Hollywood exec Susan Rogers reflected on her work into the experience of women and other underrepresented screenwriters – how they had found a way into the industry and how they managed to stay in.  Echoing other contributions she noted how prone to believing in its own mythology the film industry is.  Far too many people, for example, appeared to believe that the dearth of women screenwriters was because they didn’t write ‘the kind of material that applied to 16-24 year old boys’ commonly believed, erroneously, to be the dominant demographic (as a quick check of the BFI statistical yearbook will confirm).

The first afternoon session zeroed in on film industry data – what exists, what doesn’t, who collects it and owns it and how far they are prepared to share it with researchers or place it in the public domain.  Earlier in the day Ian Christie noted that the large dataset of British film that had to be created for ‘Stories’ because it simply didn’t exist previously, hasn’t as yet been adopted for further development by anyone else – a major omission which he hoped would soon be put right.  Sean Perkins, Acting Head of former UKFC and now BFI Research and Statistics Unit (whose existence within the BFI finally seems, after a concerted industry lobby, to be secure) declared his hope that more of the large volume of data collated and held by the Unit could be made available to other researchers in academia or industry, the better to facilitate analysis in directions or to depths beyond the limited capacity of the Unit’s staffing base.  At the same time he noted that there were significant obstacles to accessing increasingly important data on e.g. non-theatrical audiences and revenues for Video On Demand, with the UK’s biggest operator believed to be working strenuously to withhold such information.

Manchester Business School’s Richard Philips was rather more sceptical of the benefits of ‘data mining’, suggesting that more ‘what if’ based approaches would be of more help to industry (rather overlooking the point that benefit to the industry is not the only criterion for conducting film industry research).  By ‘what if’ he meant drilling into the film value chain to unpick what the decision making, evaluation and risk management process are at each stage of the film lifecycle from development to exploitation, the better to  understand how risk is/can be minimised by investors.

While such ‘operational’ focussed research has an important role to play in informing business improvement, and may well have wider policy implications, it shouldn’t eclipse the equally valid, and at least as strategically significant importance of, aggregate data about patterns and factors in the economic, cultural and social performance of films and filmmaking and film policies, of different kinds and at different levels from national to local.  Amongst these concerns are questions of equality and diversity of representation in respect of women, minorities and other groups.   Picking up this concern Rosalind Gill from King’s College highlighted the continuing issues of access and equality surrounding the film industry’s resiliently ‘informal’ recruitment and selection practices which continue to reinforce the underrepresentation of women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities in many if not most parts of the industry.  She observed that it continues to be difficult even to raise the resistance and/or inability of the film industry to adopt the kinds of formal practices and interventions that have gained ground in other sectors.

At the end of this particular day, it’s fair to say it was a valuable and welcome start to a much larger enterprise – that of getting better film policy(ies) informed by more and better research arising out of what all present hope will be a significant increase in scale, range and impact of film industry-academic collaborations.  This, of course, requires funding from industry and/or Government and if the most tangible outcome of the day proves to be a better-marshalled case for the benefits of such an investment that alone would make it worthwhile.

From research that we commissioned recently there could be as many as 20,000 businesses in the creative sector in Scotland i.e.nearly twice as many as previously thought, though the vast majority of those permanently employ no-one other than the owner (though they may mushroom on a project by project basis).  Whichever figure is closest to the truth that’s still a complex ecology of businesses/freelancers who make up an interwoven tapestry of suppliers/collaborators/customers/innovators and talent ‘accelerators’.  Universities such as Edinburgh Napier have, through initiatives like the Institute, a vital role to play in linking, facilitating and promoting innovation and reducing the time and expense taken to share knowledge generated in one part with the wider ‘ecosphere’.  Over the next year the Institute will be working with a whole range of partners to develop, draw attention to and maximise the innovation support systems that can help our creative sector thrive.  So watch this space.

It’s as simple as that – many very succesful films get turned down several times by very smart, very succesful executives in studios, independent companies and public agencies.  Equally the majority of films that do get made disappear without trace.  Film development is a game of chance (for a personal experience see previous post ) in which judgement and taste are important but not determinant and routinely overstated (see http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/209624.pdf?acceptTC=true) and no-one (well Pixar do seem to be the exception) has devised a system to beat the odds.  This has been shown repeatedly, with considerable scientific rigour and is part of the fundamental reality of the creative industries.  One person passes on a project and another says yes.  Fire the former and promote the latter and you’ll soon find the terms reversed.  (There’s some evidence that US Studio Executives are often fired for underperformance shortly before the projects they have actually been involved in developing get released and the studio’s performance improves.  In other words they get blamed for their predecessor’s decisions and their decisions get credited to their successor. For more on this and a good non-technical introduction to chaos in movie making see Leonard Mlodinow’s  Chaotic – How Hollywood really operates.).

Seven Songs for Amy may well turn out to be a smash hit like The Inbetweeners or it may tank.  If the former, then Scottish Screen’s decision will be seen as poor, if the latter as wise.  Twenty-twenty hindsight is the curse of this business and those close to a production are always going to be miffed when an exec passes on their cherished project.  There is a good case to invest public funds to keep productions in Scotland on economic grounds but those funds need to be kept separate from those invested on the grounds of a film’s significance to our culture or audience needs.  In either case some decisions will prove to have been smart, others not, that’s life in a risky business.

The feature film sector itself almost doubled in value to $117m with the aid of €23m of Irish investment (most of it public) which leveraged €93m of overseas investment, of which €6m came from the UK, €51m from the rest of the EU and €30m from the US.

We will be looking at these figures in more detail in a future post but suffice to say whatever else is happening in the Irish economy its screen sector is not suffering from the recession.