Month: February 2016

David Puttnam Interview: Future of Public Service Broadcasting

The Chair of the independent inquiry into the future of public service broadcasting answers questions about why the inquiry was set up and what it can hope to achieve. 

 

Source: Future of TV 

Lord Puttnam to chair A Future for Public Service Television – Inquiry Event for Scotland

The Inquiry into the future of public service television is chaired by Lord Puttnam. It has been set up to examine the roles and responsibilities of British television in a digital world and to make recommendations on how television can foster a more creative and robust public culture in the 21st century. It aims to address changing production, consumption and distribution practices and the funding and regulation of audiovisual content. The secretariat is based at Goldsmiths, University of London, and our project partners include the Guardian, BAFTA, Vice UK, the British Academy and the Hansard Society. The Inquiry is organising a series of events and will be producing a final Report at the end of June 2016. See www.futureoftv.org.uk for more details.

 

A Future for Public Service Television – Inquiry Event for Scotland

6-8pm, Wednesday 13 April 2016, Royal Society of Edinburgh

Speakers include:

Stuart Cosgrove (broadcaster)

Angela Haggerty (Editor, Common Space)

Iseabail Mactaggart (Director of Development & Partnership, MG Alba) 

Neil Blain (Professor of Communications, University of Stirling)

Dr John McCormack (RSE, former Controller of BBC Scotland)

Chaired by Lord Puttnam

The event is a partnership between the Inquiry, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Stirling.

If you would like to make a submission to the Inquiry, please email Vana Goblot, v.goblot@gold.ac.uk. Submissions can be seen at: http://futureoftv.org.uk/submissions-received/

Source: A Future for Public Service Television Inquiry

 

The House Magazine 

Ten days ago, the government published a set of figures which revealed the UK’s creative industries as being worth over £84bn a year and growing at almost twice the rate of the rest of the UK economy.

The sector is generating almost £9.6m an hour, and providing 1.8 million jobs in exactly the type of careers ambitious young people yearn for.

In every sense the days when anyone could credibly claim that are our creative industries lie in the margins of the economy are, thankfully, long gone.

The belief that Britain’s future prosperity was inextricably tied to its creativity was developed in the early 1990s by Chris Smith, and energetically put into practice as soon as the Labour Party came to power.

Today it’s one of the few areas of policy that commands support right across the political divide.

The chancellor and the minister of culture in particular deserve great credit for picking up the ball and running with it, notably through the extension of tax relief well beyond film into sectors including high-end television, animation, games and the theatre.

A couple of days after publishing its most recent statistics, the prime minister reinforced the government’s commitment by describing the creative industries as the ‘driving force’ of UK growth; underlining the fact that the sector is growing three times faster than any other area of the economy.

Industries such as games, animation and visual effects, which rely on a mixture of creative and digital skills, are driving much of this growth through a combination of inward investment, and the export of their products and services to companies around the globe, notably the United States.

For example, two of the most successful film franchises in recent history have
been based here: Star Wars and Harry Potter. This isn’t just testament to the competitiveness of our system of tax reliefs, it also speaks to the depth and breadth of our skills base, and the quality of our infrastructure – such as our special effects houses and our film and games studios.

The phenomenal success of the industry has meant that creative companies are increasingly finding themselves responsible for growing businesses that require visionary and effective leadership, people ready to seize the opportunities of the digital age rather than befuddled by its challenges.

Research conducted by Creative Skillset in their 2015 report ‘Creativity and Constraint’ found that leadership and management skills for creative leaders, especially in micro companies, was sorely lacking.

It concluded that if the UK is to maintain its position as a world leader in the creative industries, the development of future leaders needed to be dramatically improved.

Today, one of the principal challenges creative companies face is adapting to the sheer pace of change presented by the digital world.

A generation of would be leaders must be equipped to assess change, and look across the entire sector in order to exploit the extraordinary opportunities this rapidly evolving digital world has to offer. 
Last week, my own organization, Atticus, together with Creative Skillset, launched 
a new Executive MBA for the Creative Industries, to be delivered – largely online – over two years by the world-ranked triple accredited Ashridge Executive Education.

It aims to teach students how to balance the demands of running a successful commercial enterprise whilst continually maintaining creative excellence.

The reason we launched this MBA is simple – at its best, creativity is about turning complex ideas into practical, and marketable solutions.

It is essential that the industry nurtures, not only its creative muscle, but also the necessary degree of focus, tenacity, resilience and business acumen needed to drive our native creativity to international success.

It will be people with this set of complementary skills who, in the digital era, will deliver the final piece of the jigsaw that will determine long-term success across the entire spectrum of Britain’s creative industries.

Source: The House Magazine 

 

iPad plays lead role in Lord Puttnam’s EMBA

Lord Puttnam has swapped the silver screen for an iPad.

The Oscar-winning British film producer, whose credits include Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields and Bugsy Malone, has a new weekly routine, teaching film-making skills via a high-speed broadband connection from his home in rural Ireland. And he clearly loves his second career.

“I get up in the morning, cross my courtyard and I am in Brisbane, talking to a group of around 30 interested masters students,” he boasts, swiping through his tablet device for the seminar notes he uses to teach postgraduate studies at universities in Australia, the UK, Ireland and Singapore.

“That is nirvana, from a lecturing point of view. I am not on a plane, I am not getting sweaty and I am not jet-lagged.”

We have met in the London headquarters of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta), of which Lord Puttnam is a member, for the launch of the latest venture for his digital teaching business, Atticus Education. 

It has teamed up with the UK’s Ashridge Business School and Creative Skillset, an industry training body, to create an executive MBA specifically for the creative industries, providing the entrepreneurial skills Lord Puttnam believes the sector lacks.

“As this business gets more and more complex, with an increasing number of platforms, the job of the film-maker has widened,” Lord Puttnam says. “The same person can be making a television drama one week, a feature film the next, and then a TV commercial.

“What is missing from the equation, or has been missing . . . are the entrepreneurs that grasp the whole picture.”

The two-year EMBA programme will be delivered, like Lord Puttnam’s teaching, predominantly online, with a group study trip. The intention is to get students talking about the potential of recent advances that appear to have a future, such as virtual reality, Lord Puttnam notes.

“We want to ask students the important questions about these markets,” he says. “What will that market look like? How will it monetise itself? Who are going to be the big players, or is it going to be one of those classic situations where it’s going to be the small start-up that actually captures the market because the big players are too slow to move, or see it as a threat rather than as an opportunity, which is classically what happens?”

Lord Puttnam turns 75 this year, but only occasionally slips into the sort of technology rage expected of people of his age, cursing in frustration when the sound on a video clip from his teaching material fails. He also rails against the jargon used in conversations about digital delivery of business education.

 

“I have a problem with [the word] online, because somehow it conjures images of the way the Open University was delivered five years ago through video lectures,” he says.

“My teaching is absolutely interactive. I can see the students all the time. They are in studios. In two cases they are actually in quite large auditoria.

“I have got my computer, I have created my two-hour seminar with all the slides and clips and everything else I need. I know what’s coming up next, so I talk, illustrate, talk, question, Q&A, illustrate, talk, question. For two hours.”

He admits that many of his students were not even born when his most famous feature films were released.

“The faculty of the universities I work with are pretty good at kind of pumping up the volume and saying this is the man behind Chariots of Fire, blah, blah, blah, but I think those are kind of remote echoes for most of my students.

“I can see some slightly befuddled faces, especially when I take them right the way back to the beginnings. There is a tendency at film schools to think that the cinema started either with Jean-Luc Godard or Steven Spielberg. 

“The truth is it started in silent cinema, and there’s very interesting reasons why it benefited from being silent, and I try and explain that.”

I ask Lord Puttnam whether he thinks that being a film-maker helps him in the classroom and whether his peers could teach anything to business school professors trying to teach virtually.

“My belief is that every single school teacher ought to see themselves as content creators, but that sometimes means using other people’s material,” he says, admitting that he plays other people’s films in his lectures. 

“One of the struggles I have been having for quite a while now, is trying to make sure that teachers in classrooms don’t get intimidated by copyright legislation, which allows them to believe that they cannot do it. 

“Whatever tool you can lay your hands on that makes you a better teacher, and makes a subject more vivid and memorable, you have an obligation, I think, to use it. That’s enough to get some copyright owners — smoke coming out of their ears — but I really passionately believe that.”

 

 

Source: The Financial Times

Written by Jonathan Moules