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

Seventh Workshop – 27 to 29 September 2017 – Finstadjordet, Norway

Module 3 - How to take risk and experiment?

Introduction

New forms of distribution platforms have emerged offering a multitude of different types of content that are very different from the traditional formats.

Or, in other words:

• How to meet the demand for this new content?
• Should funds “push” the writers and producers to take more development risks?
• Why? How to support them? When? 

Case Study 1 / Le Groupe Ouest (LGO)

Antoine Le Bos, co-director
www.legroupeouest.com
Please also see Antoine Le Bos’s presentation (PDF)

Le Groupe Ouest is a writers’ residency programme in a small coastal village in Brittany (France) that hosted more than 600 people (producers, scriptwriters-directors and coaches) from different countries in the past 10 years. The main asset of participating in the residency programme is that participants work with people from different countries. This ensures much better quality of brainstorming and feedback to their script than limited to their own national environment. 

Le Groupe Ouest’s Philosophy

• To constantly develop new approaches and methodologies for scriptwriting. In pursuing this goal, LGO is a partner of the TorinoFilmLab and a partner and co-founder of the Cross Channel Film Lab. 
• Creativity and audience engagement must be developed as two joint and inseparable activities. Writers should not disconnect themselves from the spectator. 
• Writers should stop thinking inside their box and consult only other screenwriters while working on the script. They need to communicate with a much wider circle of people during the development process.
• To consult the available scientific studies when developing new methodologies. Those studies, coming from the field of anthropology, narratology, phenomenology, neuroscience and cognitive science, show how writers can be pushed to interact better with the audience ¹
• To show that 1) it is not true that the only way to reach a wide audience is “Americanizing” your script through oversimplifying the story, and that 2) European film schools lack research about the methods that would connect European films with the audience without oversimplifications. There are still too many films that do not connect with the audience. 

¹ One example is a study done by the Princeton Neuroscience Lab. It is based on the sample of ten spectators whose brain activities were measured while they were watching certain content. The initial brain signals showed that there were not even two brains among the ten that have the same response to the watched film. However, when the proper storytelling started, all the brains started “dancing together”, creating the phenomenon of resonance. The same happens at music concerts where people act together as one, taken by the same vibe. Proper storytelling can create the same effect. A theater room of 400 hundred people can create that feeling of brains dancing together where all spectators have the same emotion. In Europe, there are places like Scuola Holden in Torino and some scriptwriting schools in Germany where people conduct similar relevant researches.

Challenges and solutions

Challenges:

• At the moment, film professionals in Europe do not speak the same storytelling language or use the same keywords when talking about storytelling.
• Writing process starts too early and every re-writing is a long and exhausting sub-process
• Film funds and producers are making mistakes by insisting on too many drafts of the script.
• Sometimes people simply have good general writing skills (in terms of writing good sentences and paragraphs in the way it is taught at school) and receive funding only based on that. That at least happens in France with the CNC. However, these people do not necessarily write good scripts. Scripts need a different drive. In order to detect good writers, you need to detect a vital energy rather than a classic writing skill.

Solutions:

• Creating a universal language for European scriptwriters: Our consultants are trying to build intellectual tools for developing a storytelling craft that would be transferred to producers and directors (who work closely with screenwriters) and to public film funds that need to know the structure of storytelling to be able to evaluate projects. 
• The concept of pre-writing:
  • Invented in line with the relevant cognitive science studies. 
  • Pre-writing should be more than 50% of the scriptwriters’ job. The actual writing should start only once the scriptwriter is 100% sure about where she/he wants to go.
  • Collective thinking during pre-writing is a bare necessity.
  • Instead of keeping the body in the same, unhealthy writing position, during pre-writing, ideas are brainstormed on the beach and make the writers and their consultants walk and talk. Sitting in front of a computer is good only when you have a clear idea and structure about what you want to write.
• Using video tools:
  • The point is to tell the story in front of the video camera in less than 5 minutes, over and over again, after every brainstorming session. The scriptwriter films herself/ himself at the end of every residence day, after her/his brain was active all day, and in the morning she/he watches the video with the other people – to see how the story has evolved. These videos replace writing long, exhausting drafts that usually take all the energy from scriptwriters.
  • Such videos can also be acceptable for film funds’ selection committees. Three pages of treatment and 5 minutes of video are much faster to take a look at than reading a draft of the script.
  • Videos are playful and practical. Scriptwriter can send them to producers who watches them quickly.
  • Video tools and verbal expression push the brain to find solutions. Some scientific studies show that by oral expression - when one is trying to pronounce words - the brain is more actively inventing “a way out” because one has to finish a sentence and a thought within a short, limited time. Unlike writing in a room, when scriptwriters have all the time in the world, tend to procrastinate and feel no urgency to find a way out. 
  • The flexibility of video provides scriptwriters with a chance to make 10 videos with 10 different versions of the same story. Then they measure which one is the best within a group dynamic, where everybody is constantly challenged. 

Outcome of group discussions

Innovative development schemes within different film funds

Some of the funds:

• Insist that, at a certain scriptwriting phase, scriptwriters need be coupled with script editors.
• In case of animation projects, insist that animator and scriptwriter apply together for development funding and then attend together a script-development workshop.  
• Allow scriptwriters and directors to apply without having a producer attached.
• German Federal Film Board introduced the rule that there is always one person from the selection committee that is assigned to follow the development of each selected project.

More specifically:

• Hungarian National Film Fund has two innovative development schemes:
  • Incubator programme: for the development of historical films – they send 25 successful screenwriters to a castle where they spend time together searching for inspiration.
  • Innovative scheme for first-time filmmakers: a boot camp with ten selected directors. At the end, five of them are short-listed and enabled to make their films. 
• Lithuanian Film Center has an initiative for stimulating collaboration between Polish and Lithuanian producers. They put five Lithuanian and five Polish producers on a boat and let them sail and network, and arrange collaboration. 
• Georgian Film Center organizes script-writing calls for films on specific topics. 
• In Austria, there is a scheme for films about immigrants, opened not only for professional scriptwriters, but also for the immigrants themselves who want to write their own stories themselves.

Further possible development activities

• Film funds can act as a matchmaker between non-professional people with great ideas and producers who can help them develop potentially good stories. 
• More co-development activities are needed. A Co-producer usually comes along only late in the development process, when the project is fully developed. The whole collaboration process should start earlier. 
• If somebody comes to the funds with an idea about how to develop a non-scripted project, funds should be open enough to listen and consider that possibility. 
• There should be more communication with film schools regarding the development methods. Film schools can also introduce more development courses.
• Regional funds should be more open for the development experiments instead of blindly following restrictive guidelines.
• Including videos with the application documents seems relevant. By requiring a video, they can protect filmmakers from having to do it in front of the jury when they are nervous. Making a video is more relaxed.

But,

• When it comes to accepting video instead of written drafts of the script, there is a threat that charisma of the speaker may overshadow the basic scriptwriting requirements.
• Videos can be accepted only as a supplement to written drafts. 
• Video should be simply a “talent story” not a conventional pitch. 
• Videos always require response and feedback from multiple people. Many funds cannot provide this.  

Case Study 2 / Less is More (LiM) (Le Groupe Ouest)

What is LiM?

• LiM is a European platform for low-budget European cinema
• The idea behind LiM is to show that scripts written for 3 million Euro can be rewritten as scripts for 200,000 Euro when the planned financing is not secured.
• It is meant as a tool for either launching or re-launching scriptwriting careers.
• Partners include Creative Europe, Transylvania International Film Festival in Romania, VAF and Krakow Region.
• Workshops take place in rural areas in France, Romania and Belgium.
• The goal is to create a European network for limited-budget feature films.

LiM’s storytelling methodology

• Making the protagonist as close as possible to the antagonist. We try to develop metaphors that trigger in filmmakers’ brains a new perspective on how to develop an idea. The typical example is the bullfight scene. If you have to shoot in the arena in Seville, with thousands of people in the audience, it will be expensive. But if you shoot everything from a close distance and the crowd is blurred, it will be equally interesting. You are only bringing danger closer to the protagonist, which creates tension. Moving the protagonist close to the antagonist is the key strategy for young filmmakers.
• Writing under stringent constraints. Every time we do exercises with emerging filmmakers and scriptwriters we give them constraints. We tell them to set a film, for example, in a factory and use a specific character and a specific opponent. They protest in the beginning, complaining that they do not have enough freedom that way. But in the end, all of them, without exception, gave better results when they had creative exercises with constraints. It is also proven by cognitive science.
• A lot of group work: Writers find solutions to problems more easily through brainstorming within diverse groups than when they are alone or within their comfort zone.

But,

• This storytelling method is in contrast with the classic auteur visions where auteurs must be completely free. France is particularly challenging.

Case Study 3 / The International Producers Pooling Programme (IPPP)

Laurent Steiert, Director / Cinema department – Swiss Federal Office of Culture www.bak.admin.ch/film Please also see Laurent Steiert’s presentation (PDF)

Federal Office of Culture (FOC) is a Ministry of the Central Swiss Government that hosts the Film Department, but is also in charge of other fields such as music, visual arts and heritage. The FOC also finances FOCAL, a long-standing training structure, that stands behind the IPPP development programme.

What is IPPP?

• IPPP is the international version of the PPP programme that has existed for several years in Switzerland for local producers. It started when the film funds asked themselves what they could do to stimulate more dynamic co-development activities among both producers and scriptwriters. The fund could not develop a specific programme in this area due to some legal obstacles. Therefore, FOCAL was appointed to develop this initiative funded by FOC. Due to the success of the programme on the national level, FOC in partnership with FOCAL decided to extend it to international level.
• The international scheme is meant only for producers.
• The selected producers must:
  • be very co-operative
  • organize the workshops themselves to gain skills and rely more on self-help than help.
  • start working together in the early stage of their projects, grow together, improve marketing and international skills and, finally, apply for production funding.
  • be experienced producers with rich track-records.
• Workshop lasts for 12-14 months for every programme. 

Classical approach to workshops	The IPPP approach to workshops
Training providers define a training programme and look for participants. Producers apply and attend such workshops guided by trainers.	Participants define their own training programme with the support of the Training Provider. Producers from the pool define their own goals and targets. It is up to them to choose the experts who will train them and improve their skills.

IPPP’s methodology

Application process

• Producers create a pool of 3-5 producers. Each producer brings one project that can be fiction, documentary or animation film, a TV series, a game or VR project.
• They define their needs and collaboration model, decide on the timeline and write the funding applications to be evaluated by the selection committee. 

Workshop process

• The pool of selected producers gets 20 000 Euro per producer to implement the training project within a submitted budget.
• The eligible costs include travel expenses, transport, consulting and subsistence costs.
• Producers meet in person, via Skype, or during film festivals. They talk about their problems in a friendly environment, learn from one another, how to do or not to do things.
• The skills to be learned are: management, communication and marketing skills.
• At the end of the workshop, the whole process should help and enable producers to position their projects internationally and apply more successfully for production funding. 

Why IPPP is important?

• To help producers not rush into production just to survive, and thus contribute to over-production of films. 
• Film projects should be subjected to more rigorous competition already in the development process.
• Development costs should be recognized and funded as a business overhead, and IPPP is ensuring it.
• The role and skills of the producer should be at the heart of the development process. 
• It ensures better projects and creates producers with more skills who develop in a thorough way. 

Financing of the program

• By February 2018 we would like to have 13-15 countries inside the IPPP scheme.
• Film agencies in each partner country provide an IPPP grant each (between 10-20,000 Euro) on behalf of each production company selected for the IPPP programme. These grants are financed from professional training budgets or from development funding budgets, depending on the structure of the agencies involved. 
• Should no production company from a partner country be selected, the respective film agency will not be required to provide a grant. 
• FOCAL may request co-funding from Creative Europe / MEDIA Training in order to secure support for production companies from certain European countries other than the partner countries. 
• A network of partners should be established by the end of 2017. The partners meeting will take place during Berlinale 2018. The official launch of the programme is scheduled for Cannes 2018, so that the first IPPP edition can start on 1rst January 2019 and last for a year.

Questions from the audience

Do you also intend to take a risk and try discovering new talent during your programme? 

We aim exclusively at experienced producers, not talent development. In the future, however and after evaluation of the first editions, we may include also young producers in the pool who can receive mentoring from the experienced colleagues.

Who submits the application?

We receive group applications with one delegate producer, but every producer in the pool needs to explain his/her own strategy and individual projects. 

How do producers find each other?

They usually already co-produced before. Funds can also help producers find like-minded or necessary partners and co-producers by contacting funds in other countries and inquire. 

Case Study 4 / Pitch Readiness Programme for Multi-Episode Production

Carole Vivier – CEO & Film Comissioner of Manitoba Film & Music 
www.mbfilmmusic.ca/fr/

• Pitch readiness programme for multi-episode production provides producers and filmmakers in the region with access to broadcasters and decision-makers.
• Producers receive a grant to prepare a pitch of their project, to build relationship with potential financers and get the project funded eventually.
• The scheme is meant for documentaries or dramatic series. We fund 5,000 CAD if it is a documentary and 10,000 CAD if it is a drama series.
• The granted funding is for creating material that will help producers pre-sell the project to broadcasters before they start anything. It is important to find the broadcaster very early on because there is no purpose of granting development money for series if there is no broadcaster attached. Part of that money is also for producers to travel and pitch to broadcasters.

But,

• The money cannot be used for fees, because we expect producers to contribute themselves as well.

Questions from the audience

Do you have any case study showing innovative development of a feature film?

We have an example of a very auteur filmmaker who is also a visual artist:

• He had an idea to do a live shoot during an exhibition in Pompidou Center (Paris) and in a museum in Montreal.
• He used actors and shot for 36 days in total in both locations, creating 100 short films.
• All 100 films were online and you could pick your film and your experience by choosing which one to watch. It was all digital.
• Out of that material he created a feature film that was selected in Berlin and Sundance.
• The film was successfully distributed as well.

Initially the project did not fit into any of our development programmes, but we funded it by giving him pre-development money to go to Paris and do the research and work in Pompidou Center and around the world. This project is an example of the out-of-the box thinking.

What else does your fund do to encourage the outside-of-the-box thinking?

In the past, we used to support only TV projects with a traditional broadcaster attached. Today, in order to adapt to the new market reality, we accept to fund projects that have a digital broadcaster attached like Yahoo or Netflix. It is easier for small regional funds to change their guidelines because it concerns a smaller industry. It is not the case for our national funds that have to take into account more goals and a bigger territory.

What is your relationship with big digital players?

As a fund, there is no relationship. Netflix, Amazon and other platforms refuse to contribute to film funds in Canada like traditional broadcasters do. The Association of Producers suggested charging Netflix a fee, but the competent Ministry rejected it. Nonetheless, yesterday (27 September 2017, Netflix announced that it will invest 500 million CAD over the next five years in original productions in Canada. Let’s hope it will be beneficial for the industry!

The Role of Public Film Funds in the Future

• Introduction
• Module 1 – What are the essential and relevant core values of public funds?
• Module 2 – How to design funding programs today?
• Module 3 – How to take risk and experiment?
• Module 4 – Is diversity essential for reaching the audiences? Are there tools for evaluating the diversity of audiences?
• Presentation of the study “Current state of investment of national and regional public funds in Europe for professional training”
• Module 5 – How to integrate new technologies and players in the value chain?
• Module 6 – Distribution and Promotion Schemes
• Module 7 – Engaging with Future

• List of Participants (PDF)
• MEDICI Seventh Workshop Full Report (PDF)

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