A packed out 2024 British Screen Forum (BSF) Conference, hosted at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) earlier this week, celebrated the credentials of the UK film industry, looking to a buoyant future despite the current challenging economic environment.
There were speakers from across the sector, representing everyone from individual directors and producers to multinational staples like Lucasfilm and the BBC, as well as a timely session featuring Chief Executive of Ofcom, Dame Melanie Dawes DCB, in a week in which the House of Lords debated a new Communications and Digital Committee report on ‘Large language models and generative AI’:
“Audiences are increasingly moving seamlessly from traditional TV to all kinds of other shortform and longform platforms,” said Dawes. “So you have to take the regulatory environment as a whole and also take quite a long-term perspective… if you go back 40yrs, broadcasting was still purely about the big public service broadcasters, and we weren’t even regulating commercial radio until the nineties.”
“Today, our two big focusses are on commercial sustainability and the wider concerns that are out there regarding issues of unreliable sources, and how media interacts with – and helps shape – our democracy. Traditional broadcasters are undoubtedly finding today’s terrain more challenging, in terms of reaching the audience numbers in a single location necessary to justify advertising spend, or indeed a licence fee. It’s important to think about how we deal with that, while at the same time paying more attention to regulatory matters around areas like social media and AI.”
The magic of the movies
The conference also celebrated the unique ability of the film sector to deliver narratives with a level of allure, engagement, and emotional awareness that audiences find hard to resist. In a special session dedicated to the achievements of Lord Richard Attenborough, and hosted by Lord David Puttnam… Kathleen Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm, said:
“When we first came here, there was not necessarily an understanding of the depth of filmmaking that had been going on in the UK. I remember finding out that there were something like 36 studios in operation, and having been completely in awe of that. Far from seeing that disappear, the challenges and achievements that have been associated with that industry over the years have galvanised us to want to keep working here even more, and keep that extraordinary legacy going. The infrastructure that has now been created in the UK, and the talent that feeds it, gives an incredible depth that in many ways Hollywood today cannot match.”
Kennedy also read out an account directly from Steven Spielberg, remembering the unique resolve of the session’s posthumous protagonist:
“When we first arrived on the island to shoot Jurassic Park, we were immediately hit by a category 5 hurricane, which resulted in all 250 members of the cast and crew sheltering together in a central conference space. Dickie (Lord Attenborough) managed to fall asleep on a lounger right in the middle of the room, and when he finally awoke I asked him how he could have possibly slept through a 185mile an hour wind storm? He simply looked back at me, smiled, and said, ‘Darling, I survived the blitz!’”
There were more lessons from the film archives including a wonderful insight from Lord Puttnam, which I must confess I had not previously been aware of: “As a direct result of the success of 2001 [A Space Odyssey]… George Lucas decided to make Star Wars here.” Intertextuality at its winning best… and additional welcomed intertextuality still when we heard from Dougal Wilson, Director of Paddington in Peru, who I’ve previously worked with myself on the Hard-Fi Cash Machine music video and Adam Buxton BBC pilot Meebox.
All in all, it was a fabulous event, and representative of an industry that – perhaps in part due to the very nature of the content it creates – appears to remain both more pragmatic and more positive than other media sectors facing the same macro-economic challenges.