It’s been a hugely successful year here at Vision+Media, so I thought I‘d share just a few of the stats that prove it...
Over the last year, we’ve directly supported 350 businesses and over 500 individuals/ freelancers across the creative and digital industries in the NW through events, one-to-one advice sessions, surgeries, workshops and programmes.
Our Regional Attraction Fund (RAF) was designed to encourage and promote business development and growth and it certainly did that last year, over £500,000 was invested into businesses, which in turn created over £7.5M in gross value added to the NW. In the full 5 years of RAF, we’ve supported more than 200 companies, helping to create over 260 jobs in the sector.
It was through the RAF, along with the ERDF Merseyside Film and TV Fund, that we invested into the critically acclaimed film ‘Nowhere Boy’, which in turn produced 2,195 new paid freelance days work in the region, predominantly in Merseyside.
Another film industry highlight was our investment into Ken Loach’s film ‘Route Irish’, which enabled 1,544 days of work for NW freelancers. Route Irish was also screened in the Palme d’Or competition at the 2010 Cannes film festival.
Our Film Office Team have had an extremely busy year, with 540 productions shot with 1,907 filming days in the region. Meanwhile, through finance from the UK Film Council, our Film Team’s travelling film surgeries, workshops and events in 2009-10 have provided one-to-one advice and support to over 400 film companies or freelancers.
In 2009-10 20 trainees were recruited for the Media Foundation Placement Scheme. Ongoing monitoring shows that many of these trainees go on to work in the industry as freelancers. Trainees have also secured permanent jobs with the BBC, Guardian Media Group and Lime Pictures.
Our support for film festivals, cinemas and screen heritage delivered great results. We distributed Digital Film Archive Fund awards to 11 projects across the NW totalling £260,000; our UKFC Heritage and Access to Film project saw independent cinemas across the region funded to develop their programme of exhibition and film education, with admissions of over 160,000; and the 6 film festivals we’ve supported have seen a combined audience of 65,000. There was also our support for the North West film archive , which enabled them to tour the region with over 70 exhibitions of archive film and through our HAFAD fund, we supported film training consortium ‘Upstream’ (made up of Signal Films, First Take and WFA), which provided over 700 days of training.
Our Digital Media Skills Programme substantially exceeded all its expected targets last year, with 544 individuals trained, 18 permanent full time jobs created, over 80 freelance and 5 companies created.
20 more apprentices graduated through the Media Apprenticeship scheme with 75% gaining the full set of qualifications and 30% going straight into work in the industry (including the first full-time post at the BBC), an improvement year on year. 16 more companies took on media apprentices last year, as well as BBC departments new to the scheme such as Childrens, Comedy North and Information and Archive. Our wider apprenticeship work started in earnest on Merseyside with 10 new apprentices starting in the Creative Sector, including the first two music business apprentices in the region!
We’re also heading up the Northern Way, NWDA funded, innovation project NorthernNET, which over the last year ran and supported over 60 events providing business support to 300 pan-northern companies and training to over 340 individuals....phew!
So, all in all an impressive array of figures that demonstrates the work we’ve delivered over 2009-10. We’ll be working hard work to continue this so that hopefully, we can share an even more impressive lineup of stats with you next year!