No Freelance Training For You, Unless It’s Multi-Platform

Multimedia platforms have been around for a substantial time now, yet finding freelancers with the skills needed to produce and deliver this content, can be hard. Skillset are clearly responding to this, so is it ultimatum time for those freelancers who are resistant to change?

There has been a massive shift in the training available for freelancers this season. From now on, Skillset’s Television Freelance Fund, which subsidises up to 60% of the costs of training courses for TV freelancers, will be put into courses which add to your skills in entrepreneurialism, multiplatform production or new-media management.

If you want financial support with traditional linear television production training, then you will need to wait at least until this recession is well and truly over. And maybe much longer. Broadcasters and independent producers make a voluntary contribution to the Television Training Fund which pays for freelancers’ courses, but they have been paying less in lately having been hit by a witches brew of business recession.

Your DIY Guide To Gaining an Audience of 17 Million

Could delivering online content be the way to find treasure at the end of the rainbow? We’re all aware of its potential, but how it can be exploited?

It’s a quarter of a century since Channel 4 opened the floodgates to the growth of the independent production sector. Many indies are now bigger and richer than anyone thought possible, and arguably they are the core of the television industry.
In contrast, some of the broadcasters are beginning to resemble shop windows for the formats of any production company with the cash flow to put them there.

But there was an exciting time in the mid-1980’s when it seemed that anyone with a commissionable programme idea could put together a production company and get it made. It might not have made them rich, but they were part of a thrilling cultural movement.

Google Plans To Be The God of Television

In 2009 television advertising revenue fell by 17% which has panicked broadcasters into questioning their future. After spending 3 days at the RTS Cambridge Convention this week Moray reports on how Google claim that they can save the day.

“I’ve just spent three days at the RTS Cambridge Convention, the gathering every two years of some two hundred people who own or run the UK’s TV industry… Sessions led by the likes of Mark Thompson, Peter Bazalgette, Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw, Andy Duncan and Dawn Airey, worried over the future of the BBC and the commercial broadcasters. But the big question lurking over every session was, ‘where will the money come from?’… Then, like a deity summoned from Olympus, Eric Schmidt appeared on a live satellite-link to answer questions from the delegates and give the word of Google. If Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought up Google, the most successful start-up in history, Eric Schmidt is the Chief Executive they brought in to run and grow it. And Google is aiming to be the god of all television.

I’ve just spent three days at the RTS Cambridge Convention, the gathering every two years of some two hundred people who own or run the UK’s TV industry. The mood certainly wasn’t self-congratulatory, if anything, the tone was typical of that set by Phil Redmond, creator of Brookside and Grange Hill, when quoting screenwriter, William Goldman, ‘nobody knows nothing’.

Forget The Medium, Stick To The Message

This week, I look at the future of television content and offer some optimism for how production companies and programme makes can pave their way to a sustainable future.

We know that these are turbulent, insecure times. The commercial broadcasters are watching their traditional sources of income dwindle, the BBC is fighting to keep the licence fee revenue to itself, Ofcom is offering Channel Four a choice of shotgun weddings to Five or to BBC Worldwide, and all the terrestrials are likely to screen more repeats through 2009 at the cost of new commissions. Where’s the good news?

As long as you are a programme-maker or a production company executive, and you probably are if you’re reading this in the first place, then this is an exciting time of opportunity and change for you personally. Whatever massive shifts the mass broadcasting media are undergoing, viewers will always want professionally made, editorially intelligent programmes and content to watch. That means there will always be work for you to do. But it probably won’t be for traditional one-way broadcast television programmes in the long run, and you could find that getting paid is a more complex business than before.

Docs Taking Knocks From All Sides

“I was Rob Benfield’s researcher in the 1980s when he was a producer/director on a regional ITV current affairs doc series called Facing South (and immigration minister Phil Woolas was a co-researcher!). Rob remembers that the series was run by journalists at the time and that he was brought in to make the series more visually interesting when the prevailing “mission to explain” ethos made programmes duller to watch. Complaints about the dumbing-down of docs began 25 years ago. No doubt, I did my bit to help the process too…”

A month ago I asked whether documentary production is really in demise, or are we just grumbling? The holiday season has proved harder to crack than I’d thought, and I’m still waiting for the indies and commissioners I’ve contacted to get back to me on the subject.

Never say never, but I’ve had some interesting offline feedback from, Michael Waldman, a veteran of BBC’s Forty Minutes doc strand, and maker of The House, Daisy Daisy, Stephen Fry In America and many more. And I can offer the academic’s viewpoint from, Rob Benfield, who runs the TV production degree course at the University of Westminster.

Intellectual Property Versus Cultural Expression

I had lunch with a very senior figure in PACT’s hierarchy last week, an old friend whom it is always a pleasure to see. We mulled over PACT’s fast-growing power and influence in the television industry and with government too. PACT’s influence expands in tandem with the growth of its ‘Super Indie’ members. This is despite PACT’s own operating budget now being a small fraction of what it was five years ago.

PACT has fewer members now than ever before, but they are richer, and include a genuine international reach and market domination. It made me realise that the UK independent production sector has quietly undergone a revolution within the last decade and the word ‘culture’ has been erased from all PACT’s descriptions of its own remit.

PACT has a clear vision that its job is to ensure its members can make money out of their intellectual property. Everything else that PACT does is secondary to that role. PACT’s members aren’t programme-makers, or writers, or even producers, they are primarily businesses, and they are on a roll.

What’s The Documentary Evidence?

What's The Documentary Evidence?

Is documentary all what it used to be and as a format is all documentary still worthy? Welcome to Part 1 of my documentary dissection.

“I have worked in and around television production in one way or another for twenty years, and every single year I have heard that documentary production standards and production funding were in decline. Is it true? Has it really got a bit worse for docs every single year?

My nature is to suspect that things always look better in retrospect, that we all have a tendency to idealise our actions in the past. But we know that the culture of television shifts from decade to decade, so why not our attitude to the documentary as well? I have been prompted into trying to find answers to the fate of the documentary by two of my long-standing friends.

The first friend is the same age as me and is an experienced senior producer. He has made political and social documentaries at home and abroad, and covered some of the bloodiest war-zones in Africa and the Balkans of the last twenty years. Now working for a big terrestrial broadcaster, he despairs of the vacuous nature of the programmes he is expected to make – expensive shots and popular presenters take precedence over content, and frequent recaps of what you have just watched several minutes earlier seem to be designed for viewers with advanced dementia and no critical faculty. He says it now takes 50 minutes to establish intellectual content that would have taken a few minutes in the past.

One Of Our Agents Is Missing

If the industry’s most sort after producers and directors are in as high demand as ever, why are their rates being screwed down to an all time low? This week Moray thinks he’s had a eureka moment. Is it time to break a few balls and bring back the agent?

“I am struggling to understand why we have an anomaly over directors’ rates that would make no sense to a market economist. Commissioning executives are increasingly involved in the choice of directors for higher-profile, higher budget, productions. Commissioning letters of agreement are being sent out which specify not just the budget and on-screen talent, but increasingly also the named director.

The directors and P/Ds whom commissioners know that they want for their productions belong to a relatively small group, probably less than sixty people making factual and factual entertainment programmes. These few directors are in the lucky position that all the terrestrial and larger digital channels are competing with each other to employ them for their grander factual projects, and those directors can largely pick and choose what they want to work on. They need never be out of work.

What’s Your Future Return On Investment?

What's Your Future Return On Investment?

Re-reading my Word Of Mouth pieces over the last few months, I realise that there are three firm themes.

Theme 1: The television production industry is changing fast, and you must change with it, or you may become isolated and abandoned as it moves on without you.

Theme 2: People at large are watching more filmed content, in more ways, than ever before. Single-platform broadcasting is in trouble, not television production. So as a programme-maker you should be fine in the longer-run.

Theme 3: We know that our industry is in transition, but your guess is as good as mine about what are going to be the most popular media, how they will be funded, and who will be controlling them, even within a five-year timescale.

Times of transition are financially tough. The old paymasters are struggling and the new ones have not become apparent yet. Below are some of the reasons that television freelancers are finding contracts harder to find with the production companies.

ProductionBase Community

Category: Word of Mouth