Below are some of the contributions to the Animation Alliance UK panel discussion hosted by Animated Encounters Festival in November 2011. You can read a fuller transcript is here
Miles Bullough, Head of Broadcast, Aardman:
We used to fund short films – actually dedicate time to them specifically – but that is incredibly hard to do at the moment. They are very expensive to make, and there is no outside support for them. We haven’t made a fully funded in-house film since The Pearce Sisters, which was four years ago. We’ve released three short recently, but those have been created in downtime.
While there is no commercial return for making short films, we believe in them, and they’ve been the lifeblood of Aardman over the years – they are how we’ve kick-started projects and developed directors, by giving them a chance to express themselves through a short film.
I think the opportunities for short shorts are still there and also the technology has become so accessible and affordable that actually to make a 90-second or a 60-second piece is actually, it’s achievable, you can do that evenings and weekends.
But how do you develop storytellers? To develop storytellers you need people who have the challenge of a longer piece. And that’s not feasible to do in your free time or to beg, borrow and steal. You have to be funded somehow. And that’s the thing that we are missing at the moment. We see plenty of short shorts and some of them are quite promising, but there’s another step to go before that person can really be taken seriously for a long form animation work.
I think the lack of an outlet for animation for me is a serious problem. For arthouse animation, for want of a better word. For artistic films that aren’t necessarily going to be commercial. And that’s what I pay my licence fee for, it’s to watch things on BBC Four that are difficult and obscure that I love. And that’s where I think we should be.
Joan Ashworth, animator and Professor of Animation at the Royal College of Art
Animation does have a particular way of reading culture and representing culture. We should tease that out more – it’s something that we need to better articulate to the government, so that they see it as a treasure. A rich treasure that we know is there, but we are not communicating, because we are diffused. We’ve got an industry, we’ve got a special effects industry – and then we’ve got cultural animation, or individual auteur animation. It’s so complex, the picture, we need to hone in more on the unique parts of it, so that they can recognise it, and how it ties in with some of what they are concerned with in government, such as British-ness.
Sarah Cox, animation director and producer, Arthur Cox:
For 10 years we managed quite happily subsidising our film production. My company has directors that I work with, both commercially and with short films, and every now and then one of them will have an idea for a short film and I’ll help them get funding. And then we make it in the studio. Up until about a few years ago the money from those short films was enough to give them a living wage, enough to just cover the corner of the studio that they sat in.
But I was looking at a budget I had for a film I made with S4C about eight years ago, and it was £60,000 for a six minute film – £10,000 a minute. And now Channel 4’s Random Acts ones are £3,000 for three minutes, so it’s a tenth.
We haven’t made a film in a few years. We won a BAFTA for the last one, Mother of Many, but we haven’t made anything since then.
Very low budget three-minute films can generate a certain kind of animation – a one-off gag or a technique – but there’s very little investment in well told short stories. And so there’s very little that can lead into the feature animation, because there’s no time in three minutes to really kind of develop characters.
There used to be those ten-minute slots, 10 X 10 and things like that, or better funded films, that you could spend time to develop a character, develop a more involved story that might help lead into features. In France and Germany and elsewhere they are making those films, and they are really, really good. So we are competing in the same way that Miles is competing with television animation, short films are competing against much better funding, much better support in Europe.
Gary Thomas, Director, Animate Projects:
In commissioning films, we are always looking to maximise things – but it was one thing to ask someone with a £15,000 budget if they can do it for £12,000, and give them eight months. But now we have to say you’ve got eight weeks and it’s £2,000.
I can take that the idea that the cuts are an opportunity with a pinch of salt, especially when the Serpentine is getting an extra £300,000 a year. It seems to me not a question of cuts, it seems to me a question of priorities and reaction and conservatism.
The breadth and the diversity of people who first signed up to the Alliance was what encouraged me to bother to carry on with the Alliance. I think the diversity is the strength of what we are – that Miles and I can sit on a panel and agree about fundamental things.
Sara Barbas (animator, writer and director):
I have found recently though that these opportunities are all outside England in Europe. I did a residency in Denmark, applied for money from Media. I’m finding that if I want to make a film with which I could explore my voice as a writer/director, I’m going to need to go elsewhere. I’ve done low budget films, I’ve done a student film that did well in festivals, but now I need to take that leap and to take that leap I’m going to need proper funding.
So I actually have interest from Danish producers who, like France and Denmark and Germany, have these stable subsidies and funding opportunities. I have to go where the work is.
I actually excited when I heard about the panel discussion today, because it’s like the first time that I have seen different fields of interests of animation coming together, being concerned, trying to create an alliance to have a body or a voice together within Britain to somehow become stronger. But what is it that we could do, as educators or filmmakers ourselves, how can we be of help in terms of supporting an alliance?
Dave Sproxton, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Aardman:
BFI will be awaiting the film policy review. And that’s the point at which to attack – the point at which to say, you need to do some of this stuff. To go back to the BFI’s original mandate, which was arthouse filmmaking.
I think there are possibilities, because they’ve got a mandate to deliver now, coupled with the Arts Council.
I’m moderately optimistic, but you do have to keep hammering on people’s doors and actually, we need to find an easy way to make them understand what it’s all about.