All of South West Screen’s projects and activities have now been fully transferred into Creative England, the new agency providing creative industries support in the English regions outside London.
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Longer daylight hours during summer months mean longer shooting days, and here in the Locations department it’s a busy time of year as we receive more enquiries and work with productions filming across the region.
Right now we have a strong presence from long running productions in Bristol and the South West including Casualty and Skins, series four of Doc Martin is currently shooting in Port Isaac and the FFP New Media drama series based on the work of author Rosamunde Pilcher that is in production down in Newquay this year. We’ve also had a visit from Hollywood in the form of Legendary Pictures who are making a modern day fairytale called ‘Jack the Giant Killer’. They shot recently in Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wells.
With an aim to bring fresh and unique locations to screens in 2011 we are regularly adding new locations to our online library. Recent additions for June include the stunning China Clay Quarries in Cornwall, an untouched Jacobean Country Manor House in Somerset and an ancient forest with deer parks in Dorset. Registering your property as a location is easy, just visit the Locations and Crew Page on our website.
As well as diverse locations and skilled crew, the region can now also offer versatile production space at The Bottle Yard in South Bristol. At 300,000 sq. ft., it is the largest dedicated production facility in the South West, and offers endless possibilities. This flexible space has already accommodated, iFeatures films Eight Minutes Idle and In the Dark Half, award winning BBC drama Five Daughters, BBC pilot Dirk Gently, Casualty (BBC), Permanently Excluded (BBC), and several photography shoots. New sitcom Trollied, starring Jane Horrocks and directed by Paul Walker, has recently wrapped at the site. The Sky 1 HD production created a purpose built supermarket set at The Bottle Yard which will stay standing pending re-commission of series 2.
South West Screen’s location department is managing The Bottle Yard in conjunction with Bristol City Council, so if you are interested in using the space, just get in touch with Fiona Francombe on 0117 9529983.
With all that the South West has to offer for production right now, we look forward to the summer bringing in a high level of production activity that keeps local crew and locations nice and busy!
Our conference last week saw more than 80 key players from the creative industries, public and private finance sectors gather together to discuss how best to invest in this unique sector.
Last week’s conference “Nice Idea or Nice Little Earner” sought to get to the heart of how best to invest in the UK’s creative industries. The event was the result of several conversations with a number of people who either managed investment funds or bank lending. All had expressed interest in supporting creative companies, but had found it difficult to engage with a sector that is seen as small, fragmented, risky and often slightly anarchic. In brief, they said creatives “didn’t speak their language”. Similarly over the course of several round table meetings it was clear from talking to creatives running small businesses that they continued to have problems finding the right investment or the right lending at the right price. Interestingly on Thursday, the first day of our conference, the government published a joint report by BIS and DCMS on creative industry businesses access to finance. The research demonstrated substantial variations in access to finance across the different sub sectors of the creative industries illustrating that some – in particular the creative content sector – were more likely to have their finance applications rejected by finance providers compared to other businesses with similar risk profiles.
(from L to R) Stephen Rockman, Ellen O'Hara, Andrew Mullinger, Caroline Norbury, Will Hutton, John Newbigin, Neil Hewitt, David Prais, David Scholtz
The concept of a “common language “is probably one of the most significant learnings of the day. Creative businesses often complain that lenders and investors don’t “understand” their business models, but equally it’s clear from listening to the many financiers present that creatives are equally culpable and need to understand the perspective of the lender/investor. This seems to be borne out by the research conducted by BIS/DCMS as well as the on-going conversation of the conference.
The other common topic was the requirement for “money and more” – i.e. investment on its own is not enough; what is needed, agreed by both investors and potential investees, is a series of bridges and support between investment stages.
Other recurring comments included the following:
Luke Johnson, Risk Capital Partners
These valuable discussions were well summarised by Luke Johnson in his closing speech - that “creative industries are doing a vital job, and without mentoring and advice, many of these businesses would fail,” and that it is hugely important that companies build and maintain good relationships with their investors.
Will Hutton, The Work Foundation
And as our opening speaker Will Hutton commented, “it is vital that government and private investment work together to build networks and understanding between investors, creative and cultural entrepreneurs, and those able to seriously boost the UK’s cultural and creative economy. If we do not sort the issues of investment and business development in the creative industries, we risk seriously eroding the UK’s competitive advantage in this area.”
Following the conference a smaller group of financiers, policy makers, business leaders and support agencies met to agree how to refine our learning and transfer it into practical action. Helpfully there was an on-going enthusiasm and commitment from an already busy and probably over-committed group of people who have agreed to work together to develop some practical solutions to the themes raised. We will be reconvening these groups over the course of the summer to put together our own road map which we will in turn present to the newly announced Creative Industries Council and Creative England – the new body that Screen Agencies including South West Screen will roll into. If you’d like to contribute to this conversation then please email us or respond via the blog. We will continue to update the creative community through our blog and e-bulletin.
Topics of scale, growth, tax credits and intellectual property and were among those discussed at our private meeting with the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey, and creative businesses from Bristol and Bath last week.
The meeting, which took place at Aardman Animations on Friday 8 April, was part of the Minister’s visit to Bristol and Bath on 7-8 April, and was arranged by South West Screen and Aardman.
Kip Meek (South West Screen Chairman); Caroline Norbury (South West
Screen Chief Executive), Ed Vaizey (Minister for Culture, Communications
and Creative Industries), and David Sproxton (Executive Chairman,
Aardman Animations)
Following a tour of the Academy Award-winning animation studios’ new premises, the Minister sat down with representatives from Aardman, Future Publishing, Wonky Films. Proctor and Stevenson, Touch Productions, Fluffy Logic, Team Rubber, Sift Media, TLT Solicitors, HP Labs, Walk Tall Media, Icon Films, the BBC and South West Screen’s iFeatures scheme. Top of the agenda for discussion was the landscape of the local creative sector.
The meeting discussed the barriers to growth the creative industries face. The issues raised included finding the right kind of finance, the need to protect IP, tax breaks and increasing public procurement from SMEs.
The UK’s creative industries continue to buck the traditional models for growth and scale - Aardman is a case in point. Firmly rooted in Bristol, about 40% of its CGI animation staff are foreign nationals, it’s location in the West of England is a happy accident of history and a commitment to growing iteratively and with a passion and conviction for the good things in life. It is part of a diverse ecology that supports a range of smaller creative enterprises and plays a full role in the city region’s cultural life. It has had partnerships with major US studios but always remained committed to an “Aardman approach” rather than the imperative of the bottom-line.
The UK is full of creative businesses with the potential for more growth and prosperity, and our discussion gave us a good chance to look at some key ways to unlock that growth. However, perhaps it is also worth noting that it’s precisely because the UK creative sector is not homogenous that it can be adaptable, nimble and competitive, so the range of size and scale of its businesses also needs to be embraced.
This chimes with the ethos throughout E F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which sprang to my mind following the meeting. The book was one of a shortlist of essential texts that my economics tutor ordered me to read as an A’ level student in the 1980s. Schumacher – who one could assert is as much a philosopher as he is an economist - has been in the news recently, purportedly because of the coalition government’s support for many of his ideas: the breaking up of large institutions into smaller organisations; the decentralisation of power; the importance of public and civic service and reciprocity, or in popular parlance – what goes around, comes around.
In many ways the creative sector, particularly out of London, exemplifies, Schumacher’s doctrine - small, regional working units utilising local labour and resources, with space and room for human creativity, many seeking to combine business with a way of life where profit is not the only motive.
Upon a quick read through my original Small is Beautiful paperback I noted one of the few pages I’d made any notes, p140: “Development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organisation and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped potential.”
Tomorrow South West Screen will introduce Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Creative Industries, to a number of the region's creative businesses.
Chief Executive Caroline Norbury blogs on the importance of giving the Minister a true insight into our creative economy and discussing the challenges that companies face in person...
Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, is visiting Bristol and Bath to see for himself the vibrant business life, university research centres and cultural institutions that have led to these cities being regarded as hotbeds of innovation and named in the top 10 of significant creative clusters in the country (read the NESTA report here).
As part of his visit, South West Screen and Aardman are hosting a meeting with creative businesses of varying sizes and expertise. Ed will speak face to face to a cross section of the creative sector, including representatives from Future Publishing, Wonky Films, Proctor and Stevenson, Touch Productions, Fluffy Logic, Team Rubber, Sift Media, TLT Solicitors, HP Labs, Walk Tall Media, Icon Films, the BBC and our iFeatures studio. We are keen to make sure that Ed comes away with as full a picture possible of what is happening on the ground here, by updating him on the many issues that have been raised during the roundtables and business surveys we have conducted in past months.
For example, back in February, we asked creative companies to complete a survey in order to help us feed into the Government’s Growth Review. 75 companies responded, most of which were based in Bath & Bristol. Of these, 65% were cash positive and 62% were profitable.
However, on the business development front, we found that:
We’re pleased to say that many of the issues we have discussed and raised with officials in the past months found their way into the 2011 Growth Statement and Budget. These included an increase in the R&D tax credit, action on orphan works, simplification of public procurement guidelines to encourage SME engagement, more favourable incentives for EIS and the development of more flexible apprenticeship models to mirror the freelance and SME nature of creative businesses. Importantly the government also announced their high-level commitment to ensure that digital content producers should be able to retain and exploit their IP for the content they produce for public sector bodies.
This is good news, but the fact remains that creative companies still face many structural and economic problems, such as access to capital, access to new markets and finding the right talent. Our survey has shown that as with SMEs in other sectors, creative businesses are unlikely to have non-executive directors on their board, or have access to partners who can help scale their business or use government support services.
South West Screen believes that unlike many other traditional business sectors the creative industries offer significant opportunities for growth and therefore require specific, bespoke support. We welcome the Government’s commitment to the creative industries and in particular the DCMS's support for the establishment of Creative England. This new national body, of which South West Screen will become a founding member, will deliver a coordinated approach to the growth and prosperity of the creative economy, with culture and innovation at its core.
We will run regular business surveys every six months so that we can continue to build a profile of companies based here and help input and shape ideas for intervention. Please take part wherever possible to help us build a truly reflective picture.
In the meantime, have you got a question for Ed Vaizey? Tweet it to us or email info@swscreen.co.uk and we will endeavour to put it to him!
This morning the Communications team at South West Screen were on the set of Eight Minutes Idle, the second of the three iFeatures films to start shooting in Bristol.
We were there to meet journalists from from the Bristol Evening Post and the BBC's Inside Out West. First up was an interview with Chris Moll, Executive Producer of the iFeatures project.
We were then led down the industrial concrete stairwell to take a look at the purpose-built call centre which is one of the main locations in the film.
After a brief stop for a bite to eat, we caught up with Director Mark Simon-Hewis who gave an insight into the process of bringing to life Matt Thorne's award-winning novel, Eight Minutes Idle.
After a brief rehearsal we then met Tom Hughes who plays Dan in the film. He told us what it's been like on set so far.
The Bottle Yard is impressive when it comes to scale, and slipping off to have a nose around, I came across some pretty unusual things. 
More of that next time.
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