Bigger Picture Research

Film Policy Review 2012: Some initial thoughts

2012-01-16T14:16:31+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year, by the way.

Why Donna Anton gets my vote for BFI Governor

2011-11-18T11:45:30+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-07T09:10:25+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of such an approach include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-02-21T09:00:18+00:00

“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

2011-02-10T09:22:38+00:00

“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 o ur 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.”

Guest post: Russian film distribution market

2011-02-07T13:39:01+00:00

In late 2009 I flagged up a report on the Russian film industry authored by Nevafilm Research and Rfilms on behalf of the European Audiovisual Observatory.

Nevafilm has recently launched a new, and more detailed, study of the Russian distribution market, available to purchase from their web site (in the interest of full disclousure: I'm not working on commission).

Here Xenia Leontyeva, Senior Analyst at Nevafilm Research, explains what the report covers and how it can benefit industry professionals with an eye on the Russian market:

In a recent blog post, Jim Barratt asked what market players need to know about the film distribution market in the UK. Specialists at Nevafilm Research asked themselves the same question about the film distribution market in Russia last year.

We wondered: do many producers (in Russia and abroad) know what it takes to effectively sell their film on the Russian market? What fundamental knowledge will help them navigate Russia’s vast expanse? Let’s not forget that Russia, with a population of 141 million, boasts a truly massive market, spanning nine time zones and one-third of Eurasia.

Data collected by Nevafilm Research shows that the country has:

More than 860 modern cinemas (about 2,430 screens, 930 of which are digital) in 330 cities, serving 76 million people. The film distribution market consists of 30 distribution companies and about 500 exhibitors;

[click to enlarge]

Eighty two million Russians own DVD players. Six hundred thousand own Blu-ray players. One out of two residents of the country buys at least one licensed disc a year, though sales of pirated content remain four times higher. Still, Russia has 60 video distribution companies and more than 40 major video retail chains;

140.5 million residents whose homes are equipped for free terrestrial television. Terrestrial TV offers around 30,000 hours of programming a year—that’s 80 hours a day! Films are regularly shown on 20 national terrestrial TV channels, and popular film segments draw between 500,000 to 5 million viewers;

72 million non-terrestrial television subscribers. At least 30 cable and satellite television channels specialize in cinema, and are watched at least once per month by between 100,000 and 7 million viewers;

35 million people with broadband Internet access and 11 million cable, telecom, and satellite services subscribers with more than 30 paid or free VoD services to choose from.

Our new study, The Film Distribution Market in Russia, goes beyond simply collecting these numbers, and represents an effort to make sense of this diverse market and to help navigate its legislative and socio-economic peculiarities.

This report is no run-of-the-mill year-in-review: it’s a comprehensive collection of information you will need to know to make an educated decision about your film’s future in Russia. What type of film rights should you choose? To whom should you transfer these rights? And how much should you charge? The Film Distribution Market in Russia has the answers to all these questions.

The report will tell you, for example, the USD-RUB exchange rates for 1993, 1998, and 2008. By comparing national currency exchange rate fluctuations with the rate of inflation for the same period, you can see just how hard Russians were hit by the recent world financial crisis.

[click to enlarge]

The report will also give you an accurate picture of population dispersal across Russia’s seemingly endless territories. You can see just how economically stratified Russia’s society really is and learn the actual effects of the demographic collapse of the 1990s.

We’ve also included detailed information about school breaks and holidays, and a list of more than 30 dates with special significance in Russians’ social life. You’ll learn the crucial differences between the New Year and “Old New Year”, Russia’s extensive winter and spring breaks, National Unity Day and the Day of Accord and Reconciliation.

We provide our own analysis of more than 20 laws regulating the audiovisual sector. We go beyond defining these laws, to describe limitations and preferential conditions placed on the sector’s players, as well as their responsibilities and privileges. We also analyze recent legislative changes and offer a sampling of professional opinions about these changes, selected from the current Russian press.

Finally, we are the only ones offering a definitive list of all major Russian film distribution market players, along with a description of each player. This list includes cinema chains; film, video, television, and Internet distribution companies; content aggregators; terrestrial and non-terrestrial television channels; video manufacturing facilities; retail chains; cable and IP television operators; websites offering VoD services, and more.

The report is written by Russian film industry specialists, based on first-hand data, so you can always be confident that the information is accurate and up-to-date. Since the report was translated into English by native English speakers, you won’t have to claw your way through every sentence.

Unfortunately, Jim was only too right to note in his blog that this kind of market information can’t be had for free. You can find out how to purchase this report at our website. However, we are always happy to talk to you about your personal needs and resources, and we can help significantly reduce your expenses by offering you specific chapters (in digital or print format). Please don’t hesitate to contact us at research@nevafilm.ru.

Xenia Leontyeva
Senior Analyst, Nevafilm Research
www.digitalcinema.ru

Film data: what do we need to know?

2011-01-21T12:01:40+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UK feature film production, box office and admissions in 2010

2011-01-21T09:22:43+00:00

In keeping to its research publication schedule, the UK Film Council has published summary statistics for film production and box office returns over the last year, while the Cinema Exhibitors Association has also released annual admissions figures.

The UKFC press release can be found here, and though I won’t repeat the full detail the headline numbers are as follows (you can click to enlarge any of the charts below):

119 feature films with budgets over £500,000 began principal photography in the UK during 2010, down from 144 in 2009.
There were fewer inward investments features in 2010 than the previous year (28 compared with 35), and the number of domestic features and co-productions also fell (to 72 and 19 respectively) (see Figure 1):

Figure 1: Number of UK feature film productions, 2003 to 2010

Source: UK Film Council

The relative proportions of features comprising inward investment, domestic and co-productions have remained remarkably consistent over the last few years (as Figure 2 demonstrates), with domestic features constituting six out of every ten films made in the UK.

Figure 2: Number of UK feature film productions by type, as a percentage of the total

Source: UK Film Council

These 119 productions had a combined UK spend of £1.155bn, up from £1.071bn in 2009.
The growth was driven by another rise in inward investment activity, while the total spend on domestic features fell from £224.4m in 2009 to £174.1m in 2010 (see Figure 3).
For the first time since 2006, the total spend on co-productions rose, albeit from a historic low of £35.9m in 2009 to £52.0m in 2010.

Figure 3: UK spend on UK feature films (£bn), 2003 to 2010

Source: UK Film Council

The dominance of inward investment feature spend within the UK total is illustrated in Figure 4, and 2010 saw the highest proportion of spend attributable to this category since comparable records began in 2003.

Figure 4: UK spend on UK feature film productions by type, as a percentage of the total

Source: UK Film Council

On to box office numbers, which held their own in 2010, rising 2% to £1.076 billion for the UK and Republic of Ireland. British films’ market share stood at 22.6%, including 5.5% contributed by independent British films, up from 2009's market share of 16.7% (when indie films, including Slumdog Millionaire, contributed 8.2%, a fact not mentioned in the press release).

Among other details, the press release includes the fact that 28 3D titles were released in 2010, grossing £237.4 million (a 24% market share, up from 16% in 2009).

The premium charged for 3D tickets, and ticket inflation more generally, explains why box office rose in 2010, for in truth admissions were down (although we can only compare tickets sold in the UK, as opposed to the territory total for UK and Republic of Ireland used to measure box office gross). In 2010, there were 169,249,839 admissions to UK cinemas, down 2.5% on 2009 (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Annual UK cinema admissions, 2002 to 2010

Source: CAA/Rentrak EDI/CEA

Using movie reviews intelligently

2011-01-13T15:06:15+00:00

We're in the thick of awards season, that febrile period of movie marketing madness when professional film criticism helps to gauge the year's best offerings, and not simply advise us which ticket to buy at the box office.

But as David A. Gross, Editor & Publisher of MovieReviewIntelligence.com, makes clear in the guest post below, we should be wary of aggregated results that smooth over subtle gradations in opinion. Methodology is critical.

There is a lot of commentary at the moment about which movies were well reviewed in 2010, which is the best reviewed movie, and the implications for Awards.

The Social Network and Toy Story 3 were both exceptionally well reviewed. The Social Network's reviews are slightly better. For example, Roger Ebert, Ann Hornaday and Christy Lemire each gave Toy Story 3 three stars, and Peter Travers gave it 3.5. Each of these critics gave The Social Network four stars.

Some of the confusion comes from the methodology that Rotten Tomatoes uses to generate their score. They classify each review as either positive or negative and then take the percentage of positive reviews. That means that a B- review is the same as an A review, and a C- review is the same as an F. They consider a C review or 2 out of 4 stars negative. By not recognizing any gradation or anything in the middle, they push scores higher and lower.

How to Train Your Dragon was very well reviewed. Critics gave it lots of Bs along with As. But it is not in the uppermost echelon (its reviews were 77.2% positive; Rotten Tomatoes has it at 98%).

(An example of a movie in the middle is Eat Pray Love. By pushing its middle scores down, it ended up with a 36% Tomato score. According to the scores that the critics themselves chose, Eat Pray Love reviews were 56.2% positive.)

According to the critics themselves, which is what counts, the best reviewed movies of 2010 were

The Social Network (94.4% positive)
Toy Story 3 (92.1% positive)
The Kids are All Right (91.7% positive)

Rotten Tomatoes recently awarded best reviewed movie to Toy Story 3, while most critics groups have called The Social Network best movie. The disconnect comes from the methodology flaw described above.

This is an issue the industry is currently focused on. It would benefit from some clarification.

The following is a complete list of best reviewed movies in 2010, per Movie Review Intelligence.

David A. Gross
Editor & Publisher
MovieReviewIntelligence.com

BFI offers first glimpse of future film policy

2011-01-10T20:43:34+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Strengthen the sustainability of film businesses;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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