RESEARCH: The Business of Film

Economic and Cultural impacts on film

Throsby's View of the Creative sector

In the Uk, the British film institute and its forerunner the UK film council have published many reports based on the the economical and cultural value of film. A fairly recent report on the economic impact have revealed that film has created a total income of £3.67 billion to UK's economy. Many studies on the cultural impact of film have shown how film can carry powerful political and personal messages, give new insights and views into many different and new cultures and also help reflect our own cultural identity back to ourselves.

Why film matters to the economy?

From the graph it is clear to see that the amount of money the UK have spent of domestic UK films (The Green Line) has been very constant over the course of the last two decades. UK have recently started to create many independent films that are identifiably British such as paddington, the inbetweeners, The imitation game, Mr Turner, pride and Philomela. 

Many of these films receive many different awards at several BAFTA and even some US ceremonies. This is a source of pride for the UK, and is one of these reasons that there are so many different Hollywood stars that are British.

Another increasingly important factor of film and screen production is tourism. Film tourism is a visiting a place that has featured in many different films or television programmes and is getting more and more popular as the years progress. Approximately 840 million of tourism spending by overseas visitors can be attributed to film- included tourism.

Film is regarded as a driver of the other creative industries, in that the film industry is of a high profile and often makes use of the high design and creative skill. In the Uk, film was the first creative industry in which was supported by many film incentives in recognition of its importance.Now Fiscal incentives are available for high-value television, animation, games and for many different types of theatre production.

In most countries all over the world, American films take the majority of the money at box office. UK's independent films only took a total of 16% of the money in 2014. There are absolutely no big British film distributions. American films which are distributed by american distributors take the majority of cinema goers money and the profit from that belongs to the American based hollywood majors. Many different digital devices make it possible for large online firms to distribute it worldwide, such as Netflix, iTunes and Amazon. 

The Benefits of inward investment

• There is a lot of investment in film production in the UK, however alot of the investment is coming from outside of the UK. For Example Star Wars is an american film that was brought over to the UK. The main benefit for this is that there is a knock on effect for investment in skills and other training. 
• All of the studios and a lot of the visual effect companies who are being funded through their work, pass on quite a lot of benefits to independent producers and lower budget filming at a lower cost. 
• The UK has a very supportive funding system, through the tax relief, through ourselves, and the money that its put into film through the lottery. 
• The Uk also has two broadcasters that invest heavily in film production as well. This means that our films tend to do well all over the world. 
• The UK train up filmmakers, producers and on screen talent who move quite comfortably between independent and studio filming, and also who move between UK filmmaking and worldwide filmmaking. 

Thinking about the Value Chain

The word value chain is used in the film industry to describe the series of steps that run from the start of a film production to the very end of a film production. There are seven different stages involving the value chain and they are distribution, development, concept organisation, finance, exploitation, creative packaging and production. The main person who generally accompanies the whole film from beginning to end is the filmmaker until its in safe hands of the distributors. 

The Stages

Development- getting a film idea, and film script, right before the project ‘goes to market’ to be financed.

Finance- each film is financed on its own terms and in its own way. For example major films are able to fund their own needs however for independent films it is very difficult to get sufficient funds.

Pre Preparation- The film is not officially financed. However, money needs to be spent in order to secure key cast and crew, and start to find locations.

Distribution- Distribution is the process win which films are screened in cinemas, broadcasters and video stores. The companies that deal with this stage are called distributors. 

Exploitation- Exploitation is the process in which the consumers actually get to experience the film. The most important exploitation market is through cinemas.