Northern Alliance - BFI
Northern Alliance - BFI
Northern Alliance - BFI
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Others were more critical, openly questioning the value of the programme on three<br />
principal grounds: the quality of the films produced, the funds expended on making<br />
the films and the fact that it stands alone at the apex of the talent development<br />
pyramid. This appears to be a significant concern: if the key role of short films is to<br />
nurture filmmakers to the point at which they can step into the feature film industry,<br />
is a single bridgehead at that critical point appropriate?<br />
While the challenge of managing so much activity across the UK should not be<br />
understated, there appear to be areas where control is exercised too tightly or there<br />
is insufficient management by exception, and other areas where leadership is absent.<br />
There appears to be a need to consider the efficiency and effectiveness of employing<br />
an intermediary company to manage all of the UK Film Council‟s short film activity<br />
and re-assess whether that activity is optimally balanced.<br />
4.6 The roles of higher education and Skillset<br />
“Many people do not have the privilege of going to film school, so short films offer<br />
an opportunity to learn on the job, and [to learn] from making mistakes you cannot<br />
afford to make while working on feature films.”<br />
Mia Bays, Producer and Creative Executive, Film London‟s Microwave<br />
If the central purpose of short filmmaking is to develop talent, Skillset ought to play<br />
a central role. Skillset employs a talent scout to identify the best filmmaking talent<br />
emerging from tertiary education (especially undergraduate programmes) and<br />
signpost them towards the best forum for their continuing development, in<br />
particular the screen academies.<br />
“Overall, we feel the short filmmaking in the academies is strong, though the<br />
education system is too much about „bums on seats‟. My instinct is that this is also<br />
the case about the shorts schemes themselves; too much money spread across too<br />
many people, a scattergun approach – though the timeframe over which you need to<br />
measure progress is significant.”<br />
John Lee, Skillset Monitoring and Evaluation Co-ordinator<br />
In general, there seems little co-ordination of NCF activity with the training that<br />
Skillset supports 59 and that the higher education funding councils make a major<br />
contribution to.<br />
59 Skillset’s support has made possible initiatives such as the London College of Communications<br />
35mm project, which uses the production of a short film to teach students about high-level set crafts.<br />
The programme is expensive, costing several hundred thousand pounds each year, and although it is<br />
primarily intended to advance set crafts rather than showcase creative talent, it seems as though a<br />
specific opportunity to develop synergies with the other programmes may have been missed.<br />
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