MEDICI — The Film Funding Journey

Methodology, Skills and Professional Benefits Participants Participants' Comments MEDICI Head of Training «The 12 Labours of Hercules» Report of the Reports – Workshops 1 to 4

Reports Previous Workshops

Third Workshop Report — 17 to 19 September, 2013 — Château de Limelette (Belgium)

Module 4 – Conclusions

Introduction

This module brings together the themes from the first three modules and discusses the environment that would need to be taken into account in the decision-making process. The emphasis will be on finding practical approaches to the big questions, including:

What is a film today?
What is a film in a digital on-demand economy?
How far should funders take audience demand into account in their objectives?
Is it the funders' responsibility to protect the existing industry, or should it rather be that of exploring innovation in the interests of connecting content and audience?

1. The art of the possible, and understanding the new realities

What can film funds themselves do to influence the world around us?
What can we say about too many films? We do not necessarily have to make fewer films.
Film funds have rules they need to stick to: that is self-evident.
Potentially, political pressure could be applied to film funds. It may not yet be making itself felt, but it is already lurking. If funds keep on supporting the number of films they now support— many of which do not even get seen by anyone—it is unlikely that political pressure can be avoided.
Should the funds be funding projects that also include a business model for reaching a wider audience?
How could the supported films be both culturally AND economically valuable when the number of people engaging with them in different parts of the population cannot be shown as relevant to this?
From an economic viewpoint, the pressure may be coming from the groups that want to share film's uniquely privileged position as a cultural exception.
Social pressure comes from our lack of understanding of the nature of the demand. Funds cannot say they will support fewer or more films without knowing the nature of the demand.
In technological terms, pressure can come from the new routes to the market. Is this a pressure the funds should be shouldering? Are the funds being too conservative? When looking at the number of films being made for movie theaters, we conclude that this is still the greatest way to watch audiovisual content. Movie theaters are a fantastic social place, but we cannot ignore the new ways of attracting audiences.

Challenges and barriers

What is stopping film funds from changing things? They need to change some of their attitudes. They have to think entrepreneurially to a certain extent, and be more community-driven.
Funds have to respect certain rules. Tension exists between innovation and protection. Are those rules malleable? Funds have to stick to the traditional release model. They want to achieve cultural diversity. However, a part of the industry they are dealing with wants to handle cultural diversity only within the Hollywood context. Cultural diversity can also be something very active if the funds operate a change of attitude: it can inspire fighting for new audiences thanks to new content. Funds stick to the traditional rules of achieving cultural diversity through supporting only high art, whereby they fail to engage culturally and economically with the community as a whole.
Greater understanding of today's technological changes is necessary. A new way of engaging audiences exists in social media terms, and in other technical forms such as smart television and different forms of VoD. We use technology to compete for time more efficiently.
The social barrier comes from a lack of understanding of the demand. Film funds do not have the data they need: the social implications and social impact factors determining how many films get made and how we distribute them remain unknown.

2. Providing evidence on satisfying audience demand

Political pressure comes from the fact that politicians want some evidence on how successful films are. Politicians usually like the idea that they are reaching young people, and they want some evidence of that.
From an economic perspective, we need to demonstrate what markets we are appealing to and working with. In order to create the markets that we can potentially service, we need to work out ways of identifying the demand, and to come up with economic models based on the realities.
Culturally and socially speaking, we do not understand how value is to be measured. The appropriate data would allow us to measure it better both economically and culturally.
Technology allows us to collect the data more easily and lowers the cost of doing so. The more data and the more knowledge we have, the more influence we can weld on different other parts of the political and economic agenda.

Challenges and barriers

No one expects film funds to collect data. Cultural goods are usually treated as immeasurable. Funds are also accused of failing to do their job if their films attract a large audience, implying that they have supported something commercial.
A large part of the population may be excluded if results continue to be unmeasured. Culture remains disconnected from the audience. How can we know the info on the ethnic minorities? How can we know whether our films are being watched outside the relatively small group of arthouse cinema-goers?
Funds also need to identify and measure their failures so as to learn from them.
The laws on what data we are allowed to collect and use can be a barrier. Those controlling and sharing the data represent a problem. Even within the value chains, people are reluctant to share data.
We need to collect this data because it is a good way of working with the producers and helping them to understand the realities of the market around us better. We continually share data and knowledge that can allow us to do things better. However, who is going to pay for that data, since the funds have such limited budgets?
Smaller businesses have less access to data. It can be the funds' responsibility to provide data to cash-strapped smaller businesses and producers. Access to new data platforms is a problem: we do not have data on VoD and the latest media.
Data analysis is an essential skill. Film funds lack people with that skill. It is the analysis that makes data valuable, not the data itself.

3. New sustainable business models

Funds can be under political pressure to find a new business model to reach young audiences. Engagement is important for politicians.
Economic pressure is linked to the fact that the old models lend themselves ever less to being supported. The models and approaches differ from country to country, but if you are producing a lot of films that nobody is watching, many people will complain. Our tax break argument always hinges on the amounts we bring into the economy through tax incentives.
There are other ways to reach the market, and not only in terms of the content. It can be done with new technological devices. Things like digital cinema and satellite services change traditional movie theater access and modes.

Challenges and barriers

Lack of relationship between producers and audience.
Lack of skills and knowledge.
Lack of data, more expertise and communication.
Legal rules are barriers to new business models. How can they be changed?
The lack of consistent business models.
The necessity of sharing knowledge with the industry.
Lack of skills because we are still making content in the old way.
To what extent can smaller films attract more people when competing against 200-million-dollar movies?
What evidence do we have that anybody will watch arthouse cinema failures if we put them online?

Outcome of the group for further discussion

Shouldn't funds start by introducing a cross-media film promotion scheme whose main goals would be attracting more people and building audiences through new media (i.e. Wallimage)?
Who would have access to these new schemes: producers and/or distributors?
Is it not PR agencies and specialists in social networks that will be taking charge of the “cross-media promotion” of our films?
Producers and distributors cannot accomplish this only on their own. A pool of expertise is needed to succeed.
Such support should begin in diverse ways at a very early stage of the film, and not only once its the distribution gets underway, which happens at the end. It would help producers to focus on audience, and make more of it in production value terms.
Experimentation and focus work are what can create an extra value. Funds can learn from each other. A systematic way of sharing knowledge should be established (like within the Cineregio network).
We as funders want to protect movie theaters as a business model, not the film. But is the movie theater the best place to see films? Should movie theaters dictate the terms, i.e. windows? Is the movie house the power center of everything we are not allowed to touch?
Shouldn’t people from other creative industries be systematically included and consulted? Even if the number of apps and games that make money is tiny, these sectors, unlike the film industry, have an agile approach. Funds can learn from them, exchange experiences and share a number of problems because today we all belong to a digital industry.
Shouldn’t funds have greater leeway to change the restrictive rules, and more freedom to experiment? The rules are strict and take a lot of time to change. Both the industry and the world are changing, but film funds hold on to Europe's usual filmmaking approach.
Can we try to fund films using new platforms, and by talking to sponsors and businesses, innovation agencies and international agencies without involving public funds? Apparently, this does work in social and political realms.

Impact of Digital in Film Business and Production

Decision Making Processes

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MEDICI Third Workshop Full Report (PDF)

Illustrations by Jean-Philippe Legrand – called "Aster"

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