no shit

“The producer offset allows film-makers to claim back 40% of their Australian expenditure, whatever the budget, wherever they shoot, as long as they pass a cultural test. International projects can access the offset as long as they are set up as an Australian co-production.”

Officially in place since 01.07.2008, but really only since the launch of Screen Australia.

Screen Australia has an annual budget of AUD100m.

“The offset really only equates to 26% of the budget, as some budget items are not regarded as qualifying Australian production expenditure.”

Screen Daily (14.02.2009)

Different technologies produce different percentages of the gamut that the human eye can perceive:

  • plasma screen: max 50%
  • cinema: 60%
  • new laser projector: 90%

Developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, led by Dr Bi Yong, in collaboration with Phoebus Vision OptoElectronics Technology.

Will initially be 10 to 20 times more expensive than conventional DLP projectors, but significantly lower running costs: 35% of electricity + far longer life of the light source.

The Economist ~ Moving images into the future (24.11.2008)

1.3K proprietary system of digital film distribution streamed via satellite in Brazil.

Rain Network
Variety ~ Brazil’s digital screens give indies a shot (26.02.2009)

LOTS of statistics about anything and everything in film.

Project by NESTA and the UK Film Council, which funds 12 start-up independent film companies to embrace new digital technology and use it to build new revenue streams.

The project goes from 03/2008 until 01/2010.

Screen Daily

NESTA

“We are moving from newspapers to newsbrands.”

Is it possible to create a brand for films like they used to exist in the Hollywood of the early 20th century? Majors were brands at that time and stood for quality and specific kinds of films/genres.

“Rain Network, Latin America’s biggest digital cinema operator, will launch a pilot theatrical-on-demand (TOD) system in Brazil”

If a crowd gets together, a certain film will be shown in a certain cinema.

Limited to independent films.

Rain Network
Variety ~ Rain launches TOD system (26.02.2009)

MIT creates a center which will examine whether the old way of telling stories – particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end – is in serious trouble.

Financed by Plymouth Rock Studios with $25m over 7 years.

“[...] the Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios will collaborate to revolutionize how we tell our stories [...]“

10

“Where-as the Akerlof and Kranton model only sought to explain how psychological and socio-cultural identity considerations also have economic effect, the evolutionary generic model of identity can in turn provide a model for how such psychological and socio-cultural identity evolves as a special case of the generic model.”

“An economic system is said to be made of generic rules carried by agents, thus forming the populations of knowledge that compose an economic order. These rules are the basis of operations such as production and consumption, that occur with respect to resources and other environmental circumstances. The point of the generic-operant distinction is to highlight that economic evolution is a generic, not an operational process. It is change in knowledge, not change in operations or resources, that constitutes economic evolution.

21f

“As economies grow and become wealthier, they are characterized not just by higher levels of production and consumption, but also by a greater variety of goods and services (Beinhocker 2006). However, a widely overlooked hypothesis is that this greater variety may also then extend to identities. Economic evolution involves the multiplication of identities in the same sense that it involves the multiplication of specializations and knowledge. Furthermore, if the social network markets model of identity matching is correct, we would also then expect that a greater variety of identities would then feedback to drive a greater variety of goods and services as niche identities and niche markets are stabilized and institutionalized. At the meso level, economic evolution drives identity evolution.”

25

“The limits of individual adaptation to change are the limits to macro change.”

27

“The economics of creativity thus underpin the economics of economic evolution as an adaptive function.”

30

“[...] creativity is an information process never continuously optimized but engaged to achieve minimum sufficient criteria as determined by the specific context – a behaviour we might term creativicing.”

33

The space of creativity is a function of investment in specialization. The implication is that economic growth, which permits greater specialization, is a driver of creativity precisely because of this specialization and the opportunities it affords creativity.”

34

“Operational creativity is always a function of the relative adopted technologies and their differential material costs. But recently these costs have dramatically fallen. This not only affects the space of creativity, but also the space of identity, for just as creativity has become much cheaper, so too has identity.”

“The operational economics of creativity depend upon the opportunity costs of creative action, and the key point is that this changes with economic growth. Two points then follow. First, real economic growth increases the possibilities for specialization, thus changing the opportunity costs of creativity. Second, changes in relative prices also affect the opportunity cost of creativity.”

“Changing technologies and rising wealth thus continually shift the real and nominal opportunity costs of creativity, and thus the space of identity.”

36

“[...] generic models of economic evolution can thus be interpreted and generalised as models of cultural evolution.”

37

“The concept of creative industries is a recent development that seeks to reposition the arts and cultural economy from a subsidy-based, market-failure perspective and to disengage and then re-connect it with an evolutionary innovation-based perspective (Cowen 1998, 2002). That is, the concept of ‘creative industries’ is the endeavour to transition from a closed system operational perspective on the economic value of arts and culture (Garnham 2005), to an open system generic perspective on the value of creativity and its market and industrial dynamics (Hartley 2005, Cunningham 2006, Potts 2008). The generic model of identity and creativity can provide a useful reconception of this new model of arts and culture.”

“The engineering industries create new ideas, but the creative industries create the new ways of adopting and living these ideas. Both are thus necessary for economic evolution.”

38

The creative economy is, in other words, the evolutionary generic extension of the identity economy.

Economic evolution, in turn, proceeds to the extent that creativity is unleased and as new identities are constructed.

“Winging about the technology will bring you nowhere. The only way to deal with new technology that upends your job or your business model is to get out in front of it. Otherwise it will get out in front of you.”

“We do need to be contemporary and to comprehend the impact on our family and our society.”

“We are in an era of unprecedented creative destruction. But there is far more being created than there is being destroyed.”

“Technology is destroying the business models we have relied on for decades. That is especially true for those whose business models have been based on a one-size-fits-all approach to their customers. Think for example of the giant American television networks that are finding their mass audiences shrinking with every passing day. Why? Because people suddenly have a growing multitude of choices and they are rightly exercising those choices.

“[But] I believe technology is ushering in a new golden age for mankind. I also believe that technology is making the human side of the business equation, skills and knowledge, more valuable than ever. And I believe that societies that want to prosper in this new age need to cultivate a spirit of learning and flexibility and achievement.”

“The barriers to entry have never been lower and the opportunities for the energetic and the creative have never been greater.”

“As technology levels the playing field the human factor becomes more important. In plain English: If you run a business you need good people more than ever.”

“If you want to keep your company in the lead, you need to invest in your people.”

“As technology advances, the premium for educated people with talent and judgement will increase.”

The 2008 Boyer Lectures on ABC
Podcast