US INWARD INVESTMENT
RTS DEBATE
Elstree in Soho and Noho, one of the world’s largest network of post companies.
RM: Yes, our VFX industry is fantastic. They’ve been doing great work, and it’s a very important part of our industry. We do need to train up more people to maintain the workflow in the video effects side, which is expanding rapidly.
JB: At last count, there are over 100 studios in planning and development across the UK. Is that sustainable?
RM: There is a huge amount of investment going into new studio builds. We’re spending a fortune at Elstree, building some new stages. And Sky Studios Elstree will be a fantastic complex. The difference with Sky Studios Elstree, which is part of the Comcast group, is that it’s a production studio. It’s like the old Hollywood Studios where they produce their own content. Leavesden is the same, it’s owned by Warner Brothers – it’s a production studio. But a lot of these new studios coming into the market are what I call open market studios, so they’re bookable.
JB: A studio is more than just real estate isn’t – it’s about connectivity and the lot as well.
RM: Yes, at the moment, there’s a number of what I call portable pop up studios going up. They have to bring in infrastructure, whether that’s mobile dressing rooms through to power - everything you would need in a normal production. Remember, you could have 300 or 500 people
working there, so you need an infrastructure to support those people. One of the problems is that the real estate investors currently coming in are not necessarily people from the film and television industry. They are investing in real estate, and they’ve seen the money that has been made in the studio business. But studios are not a business that make a fortune. You increase the value of the land. Ultimately, if you sold the land you could make a lot of money because you’ve increased the value of the land. But the studio business itself is quite a marginal business.
SK: When we think about studio growth, we do need to think about what workforce we need, not just in terms of numbers, but the right volume in certain skilled areas. In our industry, our currency is workforce experience. We do need to think, as we make productions that are more and more ambitious, what is the creativity we need and what is that blend of creative and technology. This goes back to workforce and the skill base. We need that thought through and we can do it. COVID has seen such significant changes in workflow, whether it’s in post production, remote working, or the introduction of virtual production. Mandalorian set the stage, and then there was Netflix’s Midnight Sky. There’s more coming.
JB: How do we nurture UK talent going forward?
SK: You need the entire ecosystem to work together. What’s happening more
and more is a convergence of storytelling across the different genres and forms and formats. Whether it’s daytime, where you hone your teeth and experience. I think that ecosystem of scripted, unscripted, children’s, low cost drama, mid cost drama - it is quite difficult to explain to an outsider, but it works. And it fuses and supports each other. Ours has been an utterly disrupted world. If I look at the changes we’ve all seen in our lifetime, whether it’s in business model, or creative technology, it constantly reinvents itself. And I think we need to constantly do that. The key thing is how do we make sure the skills and knowledge are shared. There’s a lot of change happening, there will be more disruption. There may be companies that collapse, there will be new skills and capabilities needed. If we in the UK want to play our global role, that involves a range and breadth of skills. We need to look forward, to think about the types of things we want to do and work backwards from there in a really disciplined way.
JB: Looking towards the future, ScreenSkills has been working on how to manage the disconnect between education and the needs of the business
SK: In this country, despite all the different things, we come together. It’s very rare to find a body like ours elsewhere. We are entirely led by the industry, and everything we do is informed by the sector. We’re also data driven. For the last couple of years, we
have been asking people on the ground, what are the skills you need today? Where do you need support? And how do we support you? Where do we want to place our bets in the future? What is the right skill base, we need? Because we can work in a systematic way to achieve that. We have a lot of work to do across the education pipeline, because there is a chasm that exists between what colleges and universities provide and what the sectors need, partly because our sector is disruptive and is changing rapidly. The education world moves slowly, it has different pulls and pressures. So it’s how do you broker that? And more practically, how do you get much more of a vocational practical induction into this industry? In our industry, you learn through doing.
RM: The PSBs are very important for Elstree Studios. We do a lot of daytime quiz shows and shows like Strictly Come Dancing. It’s not just about drama, it’s about the communication revolution - a lot of modern technology requires different skills. But the whole thing really is how you make universities and colleges work to our industry requirements. There are new courses out at the moment, the T levels – they are not necessarily appropriate for some of our industry, and the GCSE levels are definitely not necessarily appropriate. We have to pursue it politically. We have to try to make politicians understand what goes on in our world, and to understand the importance of communications.
Spring 2021
televisual.com 21
YOU CAN FIND THE FULL VIRTUAL SESSION ‘THE STREAMERS & THE UK PRODUCTION ECOLOGY’ AT
HT TPS://
RTS.ORG.UK/EVENT/STREAMERS-AND-UK-PRODUCTION-ECOLOGY
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112
