Committee for Culture, Arts and Leisure OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard) Savings Delivery Plans: Northern Ireland Screen 16 April 2015 NORTHERN IRELAND ASSEMBLY Committee for Culture, Arts and Leisure Savings Delivery Plans: Northern Ireland Screen 16 April 2015 Members present for all or part of the proceedings: Mr Nelson McCausland (Chairperson) Mr Gordon Dunne (Deputy Chairperson) Mr Leslie Cree Mr David Hilditch Mr William Humphrey Mr Basil McCrea Mrs Karen McKevitt Mr Oliver McMullan Mr Cathal Ó hOisín Witnesses: Ms Linda Martin Northern Ireland Screen Mr Richard Williams Northern Ireland Screen The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): From Northern Ireland Screen, we have Richard Williams, the chief executive, and Linda Martin, the head of finance. I invite you to make your opening statement. Apologies for keeping you for some time, but, as you can see, there is considerable interest in arts funding. It is important to give members an opportunity to raise questions. Mr Richard Williams (Northern Ireland Screen): Thank you, Chair. We are entering the second year of our four-year strategy, Opening Doors. It is primarily funded by DETI through Invest Northern Ireland. In the first year of the strategy, we achieved most of the things that we wanted to achieve. We have shifted successfully to a strategy that is designed to deliver a balanced screen industry, with strength not only in large-scale productions such as 'Game of Thrones' or the Dracula film but in television drama, independent film, factual entertainment, television animation and digital content, particularly gaming. I move now to the highlights from last year. Animation was hugely successful. 'Lily's Driftwood Bay', 'Puffin Rock' and the Zig and Zag series are animation projects that are doing very well in the young people's market. Television drama has been equally strong with 'The Frankenstein Chronicles', a project for ITV, joining what has become our staple returning series, 'The Fall' and 'Line of Duty' for the BBC. Independent film had an equally strong year. The most high-profile independent film is probably 'Boogaloo and Graham', a short film that not only won a BAFTA but was Oscar-nominated. We also supported three other locally produced and directed independent films. 'The Survivalist' has not yet been screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, but it has had its press screenings. All the critics were very positive about that project. We are excited about what is happening there, not to mention the huge success that the feature documentary 'Road' on the Dunlop dynasty had in the last 1 year. That reimagined the financial model for that type of project: it did enormously well, selling on Amazon, iTunes and those sorts of outlets. In factual entertainment television, we have had the biggest breakthrough in 10 years through a start- up company called Stellify Media, which is backed by Sony and has been commissioned by the BBC to make a large-scale and ambitious entertainment show, 'Can't Touch This'. At the outset of the Opening Doors strategy, we undertook to try to drive gaming and digital content harder, and we appointed an expert in that field. He led our first trade mission to San Francisco to a games development conference. He is working closely with the newly created private sector Gaming NI grouping. The Irish Language Broadcast Fund also had a very strong year. Critically, the highlight was 'An Bronntanas', which had two forms: it was a television drama series and was also cut as a film. It was Ireland's nomination to be considered as a foreign film at the Oscars. It also won at the Irish Film Festival in Boston. An education project from Tobar won at the Dublin Appys, which are digital awards. Most recently, a successful series on the Mournes was broadcast. The Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund has been equally energetic over the last three or four months. It had two notable series in 'Imagining Ulster', which went out a couple of months ago and provoked some discussion and interest, and 'Then Sings My Soul', which went out in a similar time frame to positive response. 'Five Fables', another Ulster-Scots project, has been nominated for two awards at the Celtic Media Festival, which is coming up next week. I should not say this in a public forum, but I would be surprised if it did not win one of those two awards. I hope that it will. In the DCAL-funded aspects of our strategy, we had, as you are well aware, a very anxious period before Christmas when we thought that we might be facing a scenario in which our DCAL funding would go from a high point two years ago of £3 million a year down to £1 million a year. With tremendous support from our stakeholders and, most critically, the beneficiaries and users of their services, through the public consultation, that position has shifted, and we have an indicated budget for this year of £1·87 million, secured by the Minister. Obviously, that is considerably less than £3 million but is a lot more than £1 million. We have calculated that the £1·87 million is sufficient for us to sustain the main core elements of the educational and cultural ecosystem that goes alongside the economic work that is supported by Invest Northern Ireland. That £1·87 million will allow us to keep the doors open in the three creative learning centres at the Nerve Centre in Derry, Nerve Belfast and the AmmA Centre in Armagh. The three creative learning centres are the backbone of and most important driver in our education strategy and education work. I will give you some indication of the scale of what they do. In the last year, they worked with 2,500 teachers, and, importantly, they exceeded their targets. In the context of the Minister's policy priorities, we targeted them with working with at least 70% of schools that are in the most-deprived areas and have the children who are in greatest need. They exceeded those targets. Over the three creative learning centres, they had 75% on that target. It also allowed us to continue our after-school film clubs, which are delivered through Into Film by Cinemagic and the Nerve Centre. At the moment, they reach over 260 schools across Northern Ireland. In the previous evidence session, there were questions about penetration and reach in different areas. There are two things to say about the 260 schools with after-school film clubs: first, they are all schools that have the greatest level of need in the education system, and, secondly, they are spread right across Northern Ireland. It has also allowed us to continue our support. It would have been lights out for these organisations if they did not have our support of Cinemagic, the Foyle Film Festival, CultureTECH and the Belfast Film Festival. I have a quick plug for the Belfast Film Festival. It opens tonight with Mark Cousins's film, 'I Am Belfast', and will go on for the next 12 days or so. They are tremendous supporters of the local content that is produced here and work very closely with us. Lastly, the funding has allowed us to continue our work on the digital film archive. I have another plug: we are relaunching the digital film archive on Friday at the Ulster Museum. I can recall saying this to you before, Chair: I think that the digital film archive is our strongest tool for outreach and social inclusion for the simple reason that one of our primary and most successful audiences for the digital film archive are folks in nursing homes, who, maybe not surprisingly, respond enormously well to archive material from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, which obviously reflects periods of their lives. As far as we are concerned, this is all a very positive story, but that is not to say that there have not been casualties as a result of the cuts in the savings delivery plan: there have been cuts. We have sought, as far as we possibly can, to protect front-line services. As I said, we want to sustain the 2 whole ecosystem, and I think that we can do that. We have applied a 5% cut almost completely across the board. The creative learning centres have been saved from that, but everything else, including our own overheads, has received a 5% cut. As to how we will deal with that cut in our own overheads — that came up in the previous evidence session — we are expecting to avail ourselves of the voluntary exit scheme to a modest degree. Maybe most significantly, we dropped an ambition that we had developed only recently — I know that it is a great disappointment to the Northern Ireland Screen board — which was to become much more involved in developing and supporting education provision for coding, with the support of CoderDojo, with after-school clubs that are similar to the after-school film clubs. We think that coding and coding education are very important elements of a successful future for Northern Ireland's economy, and the issue needs to be addressed. It does not need to be addressed by Northern Ireland Screen in particular, but we are disappointed that we have stepped back from that. We have also stepped back from our ambitions to pilot a digital apprenticeship scheme, which would have targeted social inclusion more aggressively. We were considering working with the Prince's Trust to develop that, but we have had to put that on the back-burner. Also facing very considerable cuts is our contribution to FabLab, a Nerve Centre initiative on the STEAM agenda using 3D printers in education forums, to which we have greatly reduced our commitments.