EXCLUSIVE: The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund is awarding £200,000 to the British Screen Forum to find solutions to data gaps in the UK independent film ecosystem, with the aim of helping secure investment and boost the profitability of UK companies.
The British Screen Forum will work with partners University of Exeter and Goldsmiths, University of London.
Two pilot case studies will be delivered. The first will focus on data sharing between distributors and exhibitors, providing both groups with new insights on films and film audiences to improve audience targeting and optimise marketing spend.
The second pilot will develop a new database which captures commercial performance of films. It will explore how to gather and analyse the lifetime commercial performance of films while respecting the commercial sensitivity of the features. This will include grouping films together into categories, such as budget size or genre, and allowing users access to lifetime performance data within these categories, to help with understanding market appetite and building budgets.
The aim is for the databases to be freely available to those working in the UK screen sector.
The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund, as part of the BFI’s National Lottery Funding Plan, 2023-2026, seeks to find solutions to the UK screen sector’s most critical challenges.
Between 2024 and 2026, up to £1.8m will be distributed to not-for-profits across up to five topics, which to-date have included the video games industry, AI for screen archives, and equality, diversity and inclusion data collection for film production.
“It has long been established that the lack of access to data and data insights acts as a drag on investment and on profit maximisation in the sector,” said Pete Johnson, chief executive of the British Screen Forum.
“With case studies led by Dr Michael Franklin (University of Exeter) and Ben Keen (British Screen Forum) and with input from Dr Martin Smith (Goldsmiths) this pilot project aims to address the problem head on with a view to finding innovative mechanisms to unlock data insights that can stimulate equity investment and boost revenues at various points along the film value chain.”
“It’s not always recognised that, in recent years, trends have shown that the public watch more, not less, films than they ever have before,” said Rishi Coupland, the BFI’s executive director of industry development and innovation.
“What is changing is that the ways in which our audiences access films, and their motivations for watching them, have diversified and multiplied. Here at the BFI, we have matched our support for the making, distribution and exhibition of independent film with an increased commitment to publishing a respected suite of research and data – including our upcoming report Small Screens, Big Focus.”
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