So why are they giving us $350,000.00 to make a feature?
Stephen Cleary, who is the ace film developer running the FilmLab workshops, once showed the profound differences between how countries treat film development in one of his seminars.
There are three “extreme” situations (When you’re reading this Stephen, please forgive my liberal interpretations):
- Wholly Private Development Environment – Hollywood, Bollywood, Hong Kong
- Wholly Public Development Environment – Dictatorships, single party states or “democratic, but-not-quite-liberal-democratic” countries
- Mixed Development Environment – Australia, NZ, France, Britain. Anywhere nice to live.
The key differences are in:
- How much money there is (and how many it’s shared between)
- Where it comes from
- What it’s spent on
How wholly private development environments work is pretty obvious. There’s a big domestic market for films, a lot of private money and a lot is spent on development, production and exploitation. Films have to make money. It explains why the same animated features keep getting made on the same economics – Spend 100M+ to make a film that has a wide 3000+ screen release for a broad audience.
Wholly public environments are totally different. They’re usually elite organizations that represent the values of the hegemony. Few films get made, and whether they succeed in the marketplace or with audiences doesn’t matter so much. Winning awards at festivals is, however, as it is a reaffirmation of the elite by another bunch of elites.
For animators this can be a boon – the chance to make animated shorts with low commercial expectations for their whole careers. It’s like living off welfare with the state providing everything you need. It is only in these environments that animated filmmakers can have multiple opportunities to make short films and so they can get really good at it. The cold war saw plenty of great animated shorts come from the eastern bloc from guys like Pritt Parn, Jan Svanjmajer, Karel Zeman, Jiri Trnka. It was the quality and volume of these shorts that made the Animation festivals like Annecy, Zagreb, Stuttgart, Ottawa & Hiroshima what they are today. Are there nearly as many prestigious live action festivals out there where the blue ribbon event is the short films? With the end of the cold war the money for these films is not what it used to be, although countries like Estonia still fund a lot of shorts. These festivals remain strong as the technology has kept animated shorts affordable for auteurs.
In mixed development economies, like Australia, there isn’t enough domestic demand for films to be made privately, but not enough public money for the government to foot the whole bill. After all, unlike dictatorships they can’t exactly pick a couple of favourites and give them the lion’s share of a small pot of money. Instead, they do what they can to get projects and talent to a stage where they can find a market. A reasonable pot of money spread out over a lot of people and projects in “development”.
For projects, this means funding development to a stage where a project is good enough to be picked up in the market place by a sales agent and distributor, and then providing (often a big) part of the finance when the “marketplace” has evaluated the project worthy of being greenlit. The decision on what gets made here is left more in the hands of the “marketplace”.
For individuals, this means professional development in the form of education and small project opportunities, like short films. Which is where FilmLab squarely fits in. It’s not a lot of money in terms of finance for a feature, but it’s a lot of money for professional development of a team, which is exactly what it’s intended to do. It’s a healthy amount of money to hopefully develop 8 more teams of filmmakers that have skills and relationships to produce more work that will nourish the screen economy. And Teams are important. Since at least as long as we’ve been doing this, there has been an emphasis on backing teams with the potential for continuity in the long run.
Being a filmmaker in this environment requires a certain stratagem to survive. The opportunities aren’t as many as in a wholly private environment and you don’t get the “welfare” afforded to you in a public system. The government will give you limited opportunities to set yourself up so you can’t squander them. I like to tell filmmakers (especially ours) that no one here will keep giving them money to make short films. It’s difficult in animation because they see the same guys from obscure countries making films well into their 40s and 50s getting into the festivals every year. Realistically you have THREE opportunities to make a short, so each one better be getting you closer to supporting yourself in making features, TV or commercials. It’s definitely this sort of thinking that’s helped us establish our sustainable service work. FilmLab will only help us to get closer to our goal of originating, producing and exploiting our own feature film projects.
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Moving from one development environment to another is also tricky, as we experienced when we made our short, Sweet & Sour with the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. Here was a state owned studio stuck between a rock and a hard place. For commercial reasons, it’s now become part of their agenda to make feature films that can find distribution in more territories outside (presumably limited releases in) Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, but at the same time make films that represent China the way the party wants.
Doing that required setting stories in China (generally period settings), having as many Chinese characters as possible, but none of them could be responsible for conflict (and having a “foreign” source of conflict would suggest that China doesn’t think too well of the outside world which also unacceptable). Often they adapted classical works that struggled with foreign audiences (John Woo’s massive budget epic “Red Cliff” still hasn’t found a US buyer, and there’s only so many times you can keep adapting “Journey into the West” aka Monkey Magic). Quite challenging when many of these requirements work at odds with developing something that can find an international (and more importantly US) audience.
