NFM has £80,000 of Film Council funds to invest in 6 new talents

North East writers, directors and producers are being given the opportunity to show their flare and creativity through an annual short film scheme, Stingers.
 
£80,000 will be invested in 6 short films through this year’s Stingers Digital Short Film Scheme. Open to writers, directors and producers, Stingers has been run by Northern Film & Media in partnership with UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund for 8 years.
 
In the last 8 years, Northern Film & Media has invested over £500,000 in 74 short films through the Stingers Scheme. Past participants have gone on to win international awards at Venice and Berlin whilst work has premiered at the Edinburgh and London International Film Festivals.  Previous films have also attracted and secured the acting skills of top level talent, including Ruth Jones (Gavin & Stacey, Little Dorrit, Little Britain), Donald Sumpter (Constant Gardiner, Our Friends in the North, K-19 Widowmaker) and Michael Hodgson (Wonderland, Spooks, 2,000 Acres of Sky).
 
Victoria Johnson, Training and Development manager at Northern Film & Media, says: “Stingers can be a real launch pad for North East writing, directing and producing talent. It has a great track record of producing wonderful short films; films that have gone on to be a success in their own right. Stingers provides Northern Film & Media with the opportunity to discover and develop new film talent, building skills and experience. We encourage innovation and support the production of creative work of real quality. The North East has a lot to offer and Northern Film & Media wants to give people the best chance of success in this competitive industry.”
 
Bahrat Nalluri, Director of Miss Pettigrew lives for a Day and producer of shows such as Spooks and Hustle, is patron of Stingers. Bahrat says: “A scheme such as Stingers allows new talent to breathe, to have a go. Short films are a challenge, a very different kind of challenge from feature films or TV, but a challenge that is worth embracing.
 
Those interested in applying to the Stingers Digital Short Film Scheme should visit www.northernmedia.org from Monday 28 September 2009.
Stingers Digital Short Film Scheme is broken into two strands this year – Mini-Stingers and Maxi-Stingers. Mini Stingers is open to new writing and directing talent. 3 short films will be made through the mini-stingers strand for a budget of £7,500 per film. Maxi Stingers is open to writers and directors with more experience. 3 short films will be made through the Maxi-Stingers strand with a budget of £12,500 per film. 
 
12 films made through Stinger 7 during 2008/2009 will be screened at a special event in November 2009.

Newcastle creative squeeze, while Manchester spends

The BBC move to Salford MediaCity has received a fair amount of coverage – powers in London hail the move as a structural change in the TV market to reduce dependence on the capital and to pump up ‘the regions’. However, cities like Newcastle are seeing the blood sucked out of their creative economies because of the focus on Manchester… which, to add to the challenge, is much trickier to reach by train than London.

The latest report says that the BBC may go £91million over budget on the move. Just think what we could do in Newcastle with a spare £9million, let alone £91million! I can give you a shopping list for Hoults Yard’s media cluster… TV studios, post-grad training centre, superfast broadband, warehouse flats, funky bars, live music venues, more fab offices… and, being a commercial player, we’d happily invest the bulk of the money against the business plan (with appropriate incentives from the heritage lottery fund or whoever!?).

But, just to clarify, the £95million is the current estimate of the overspend. The budget is £350m, including enlightened projects like moving BBC Sport to Manchester in 2011, only a year before the Olympics in London 2012. And, the article below reckons ‘The BBC …has committed to paying 95 per cent of the value of the London homes of staff choosing to relocate from the capital.’

I picked up the latest story from Crain’s Manchester Business news:

9:45 am, July 20, 2009 
Media City move could cost BBC an extra £91m
By Simon Binns

The BBC’s decision to move five departments to Media City on Salford Quays could be £91m more expensive than keeping them in London, according to a report in today’s Daily Telegraph.

A 2006 report called BBC North – the value for money case, obtained though the Freedom of Information Act, said the £350m move to Salford could be anything from £75m more expensive to £15m cheaper. 

But those figures include £16m of state funding from the government and Salford City Council, conditional on the move going ahead.

Taking away that subsidy, the move to Salford could be “anywhere from £1m to £91m more expensive than staying in London,” according to the report.

The BBC is also likely to obtain a lower price for its Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush due to the declining property market, and has committed to paying 95 per cent of the value of the London homes of staff choosing to relocate from the capital.

A second report obtained by the paper, drawn up for the BBC by relocation firm Governetz, said the fall in property values could land the BBC with an £8m bill for the home purchase scheme.

“In all the circumstances it seems clear that the BBC is at high risk through…weakness of project management control and wholly inadequate staff resourcing,” the report concluded.

Governetz, whose report was compiled last year, said the corporation could be “mired in an employee relations disaster” by September 2009. However, with large numbers of staff voting to make the move to Salford, these fears seem unlikely to be realised.

A BBC spokesman said: “We have never presented Salford as a money-saving project. That said we are working as hard as we can to ensure that the project is delivering the highest possible value for money. In the long term – indeed, over 20 years – we expect savings on London operating costs.”

In December 2006, BBC director-general Mark Thompson, told the corporation’s governors that the move north would be “very cost effective”.

Creative industries – Feargel Sharkey involved

The Mandrake Club, a London networking group at Adam Street Club, hosted their monthly session this week with Feargal Sharkey explaining his new role at UK Music. There are lessons for creative industries across the UK in his message.

Amazingly, for the Undertones star from Northern Ireland – perhaps most famous for writing Teenage Kicks – he is the head of this new government quango to support the music industry.

Feargal talked elequently about the need for a collaborative approach across historic industry divides as the music industry faces the assaults of piracy, digital convergence, MySpace and international competition.

It’s a big political challenge to bring rival groups together – and also to link with the likes of the Internet Service Providers and the peer-to-peer music sharing sites. Feargal talked passionately about how unprecedented these joint discussions have been and how positively they are being engaged with. (Clearly it helps if you are one of seven children yourself and used to politics from a Northern Irish context!)

Feargal has commissioned new research amongst teenagers to understand their love of music (83% said they couldn’t do without music, only 60% said they couldn’t live without their mobile phone!). He has recruited heavyweight industry support (his chairman, Andy Heath, founded Beggar’s Banquet records – Feargal has taken to the stage to sing Teenage Kicks with Culture Secretary Andy Burnham on guitar!)

UK Music’s members include the Association of Independent Music (AIM), theBritish Academy of Composers & Songwriters (BAC&S), BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited, the MCPS-PRS Alliance (The Alliance), the Music Managers Forum (MMF), the Music Publishers Association Limited (MPA), theMusicians Union (MU) and Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL).