 Good morning, and welcome to the 15th meeting of the Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Relations Committee in 2017. I would like to remind members and the public to turn off mobile phones and any members using electronic devices to access committee papers should ensure that they are switched to silent. Apologies have been received from Jackson Carlaw and I welcome Margaret Mitchell MSP as his substitute. Our first item of business today is a decision on taking item 3 in private. Are members content? For our second item of business today, we will hear from representatives from film location offices and industry experts in around-table evidence session on filmmaking in Scotland. I would like to welcome the witnesses here today. Perhaps we could start by introducing ourselfs. Since this is around-table, I will work anti-clockwise. My name is Joan McAlpine, I am convener of the committee and I am an MSP for the south of Scotland. Lewis MacDonald, deputy convener and MSP for North East Scotland. I am Mary Evans and I am the MSP for Angus North and Merns. Richard Lochhead MSP for Murray. Sarah Scott MSP for Shetland. We have just been filming Shetland in Shetland. Ross Greer MSP for the west of Scotland. Stuart McMillan MSP for Grunwick and Inverclyde. Margaret Mitchell MSP, central Scotland. I am Rosie Ellison from Filmed Embraer. Jennifer Reynolds from Glasgow Film Office. I am Colin Simpson. I cover European affairs tourism and film with Highland Council. I am Julie Craig from FiveScreen and TayScreen, serving Five and Tayside. Good morning. I am Marie Archer from Aberdeen City and Shire Film Office. Good morning. I am Alasda Scott. I am from Edinburgh Napier University and part of my role is director of Screen Academy Scotland, which is our partnership with Edinburgh College of Art. John Archer run Hopscotch Films and chair independent producers Scotland. Good morning. I am Laureate Dunn. I am a freelance location manager. Thank you very much. I would like to invite Rosie Ellison to make some brief opening remarks. Thank you very much to everybody for inviting us to talk to you this morning. I run Filmed Embraer, which is the film office for Edinburgh, East Lothian and the Scottish Borders. Filmed Embraer is part of marketing Edinburgh, the destination marketing bureau for the City of Edinburgh Council, and we are also funded by the councils of East Lothian and the Scottish Borders. As a film office, our remit is to promote the region to filmmakers on behalf of the local authority and to facilitate productions filming in the region. Filmed Embraer, we generally work with about 500 productions a year, ranging from low-impact factual TV programmes like Countryphile, X Factor, party political broadcast filming, right through to feature films and TV dramas such as Outlander, T2 Trainspotting, Avengers, Infinity War and everything in between. Since the film office in Edinburgh was established in 1990 and was the oldest one in Scotland, we have supported over five and a half thousand productions in the region, which amounts to over £85 million worth of economic impact. To promote the area, we work with property and landowners in the region who may be interested in having filmmakers use their property. In our case, we find it increasingly important to talk about the value of film tourism as a great interest to landowners and property owners. We have information and photos for a huge range of potential filming locations, which we share with filmmakers in response to a brief. This register is continually evolving. We update it daily with changes or new locations, which we source through promotion events and research. In order to facilitate productions, we work with the local authority on policies and procedures that are film friendly, policies that we check against the other film offices in Scotland and around the UK. Those are backed up by a filming charter with the local authority. We are therefore in a good position to be able to advise filmmakers about timescales, processes and costs to film in the region. We also keep a register of local crew and production services so that incoming productions can hire locally. We work with local education establishments on workshops and promote training opportunities to new entrants in the region. At Film Edinburgh, we are part of an informal network across Scotland of four film offices, the others being Glasgow, Dundee, which is five-screen, Tayscreen and the Highlands film office. There are 13 film liaison officers representing the other local authorities or most of the other local authorities around Scotland. Film liaison officers' role is to support filmmakers in their region, though there is uneven coverage across Scotland due to resources. At the centre of the network sits Creative Scotland's screen commission. It is like a wheel, and we are on the outside and Creative Scotland is in the middle. The screen commission is the first port of call for many UK and international productions looking at Scotland as a whole. They take the lead on proactive marketing and promotion in key markets such as the US and Europe. The screen commission has funds to put towards bringing filmmakers to Scotland, and some of the film offices can complement those with their own recce support. Creative Scotland's screen commission also manages Scotland's film funding and incentive programme, which has been very helpful in the last couple of years since it was introduced. Film officers and liaison services collect statistics to demonstrate the amount and value of production to the local authorities. We share those with Creative Scotland on a voluntary basis in order to help them to create the pan Scotland statistics. In our case, we also use them to benchmark against other parts of the UK, which help us when forming filming policies. In 2015, Scotland brought in £52 million of economic spending from production. UK tax incentives are a huge draw for international filmmakers at the moment, and the weak pound is also helping. With upwards of £2 billion spent in the UK on high-value film and TV drama in the UK, the arrival of Netflix and Amazon and film industry-styled tax breaks for high-value TV, which is spending over £1 million per episode, has been a huge boost to the industry. Scotland has managed to attract Outlander, which is one of those types of shows, which built its own film studio to house a production and has resulted in more crew being trained at a high level and an increase in facilities basing in Scotland, which together makes Scotland a more attractive place for filmmakers. We still need more film studios in Scotland, and we are competing with the rest of the UK, where yet more film studios are being created right now in Wales, Liverpool, London, Manchester and the north-east. Any production thinking about basing in Scotland is interested in the whole package—studio, sound stages, incentive finance, tax relief, accessible and varied film-friendly locations and production crew in facilities, film-friendly local authorities and the co-operation of local agencies and businesses are vital to film and TV production, whether they are indigenous or inward productions. As such, film office support goes hand-in-hand with film studio provision in terms of making Scotland an attractive proposition for filmmakers. We are not the first committee of this Parliament to look into the screen sector and the economy committee in the last Parliament did quite an extensive piece of work on the screen sector where a number of important points were made that were taken up by the Government in terms of helping to support the film industry in particular in Scotland. Some of the evidence from that committee was quite relevant in terms of film locations and incentives for attracting film companies to come here. An issue that was raised by a number of people involved in production was the whole issue of local hire. As you outlined, there are 52 million of economic spending that is attracted, but a number of people working in production raised questions about the amount of local crews that were hired and the benefits to locations, even if they did attract outside filmmakers. One person who gave evidence, Ben Owens, a scenic artist, pointed to the Canadian example whereby you are giving incentives in return for a 25 per cent or 50 per cent local hire. That was also repeated by Bill Doyle who gave evidence to the committee. I wondered whether you could refer to that in terms of whether you think that more could be done to encourage local hire rather than crews being brought in from elsewhere in the UK. Andrea Calderwood raised the issue of, although the tax incentives that you refer to have been very beneficial to the UK as a whole, whether they could be regionalised to be of particular benefit to Scotland. I do not know whether anybody wants to start off on that theme. I have certainly raised the issue at things like the TV festival, the idea of production companies, the idea of having some sort of condition on any funding that they get or any help that they get that they must hire, let us say, a percentage of local services and so on. Most production companies that are inward coming, they say that they would resist something like that. I think that it would certainly be an interesting matter for discussion by Creative Scotland and also with the tax authorities to see whether there cannot be some kind of, as part of getting any of these incentives and funding support, some kind of onus on productions to use local crew and services. Beyond just local crew, there are also different production services. There is an organisation called Screen Facility Scotland and they are repeatedly saying that instead of using the local services that are here, which could be almost anything from transport to camera har or whatever, people will insist on using London-based services. In Canada, my understanding is that, like the Canadians, there is no way that you can make a film or television production in Canada without using a fair proportion of local crew. John Archer, do you want to come in there? The operating point system, I think, so that you have to show that you are working with local people. I think that one of the things that we have discussed at IPS is whether productions that benefit from an incoming production grant shouldn't work with local producers as well, because that's a way of training people up to work on big productions, and then that at least leaves some benefit to the local economy and to people's own careers, so they can develop the projects themselves. On the other hand, it's a mobile business. Some of our best DOPs go abroad to work in Canada and make their living there. However, the more we have great productions here for them to work on, the more they stay at home and develop their careers. Rosie, did you want to come back in there? Benefitting of the UK tax credit means it is a points-based system as well, and you have to hire a local crew, but by local it's UK, so a crew can come from anywhere in the UK. There is further funding within Scotland, the production growth fund, which is also based on how much you spend in Scotland, and that is on a four-to-one ratio. Productions that benefit from that fund, which is managed by Creative Scotland, have to hire locally, whether that's locations or crew or services, and they are coming from Scotland. That doesn't necessarily mean that they come from the town in which the filming is taking place. It can be anywhere in Scotland. The other point is that productions have different needs. They might have crew that they are used to working with. I think that the film sector review pointed to there being about 800 crew in Scotland, possibly 1,000 now. There might be around that sort of level. We may not have enough to service every production here, so people bring crew up with them. Similarly, as John has pointed out, experienced crew here may want to go and try out Canada, London or the US. I think that the work of the film colleges and universities here are doing is critical to the overall package in terms of training young people for the industry, and providing opportunities to learn skills and crafts is just as important as training people to be directors and producers. Following Rosie's point up, the partnership that we have between Edinburgh Napier University and Edinburgh College of Art was established in 2005 to create Screen Academy Scotland, which delivers practice-led postgraduate courses at a professional level to enable students in tertiary education to get to the highest possible level of training that they can as new entrants go into the industry. That has been very successful over the past 12 years, pointing to successes recently like a recent graduate, Robin Hague, who is based in the north-west of Scotland, who has filmed Hula, won the best short drama at this year's Celtic Media Festival and is now going around to various festivals last year. Another one of our postgraduate graduates, Ben Sharrock, directed a feature film called Picadero, which won the Michael Powell Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, showing the level at the top end of creative talent being developed through Screen Academy Scotland. One of the issues that we face currently is that it was established with course enhancement funding, which we have benefited from over the 12 years, which has come from creative skillset, originally the sector skills council for the film and screen media. Currently there's a policy change in terms of how that's delivered. The previous strategy from the British Film Institute has come to an end. In December of last year, they announced the kind of headline points of their new strategy, which runs from 2017 to 2022. But due to various policy delays, the framework of that hasn't yet been announced. It's going to be announced at Westminster on the 28th of this month. Consequently, there's a vulnerability about some of the funding that we have that helps us in our programme of professional development for students and in the various ways in which students can engage with the industry in Scotland. Preserving that and having sustainable support for those industry education links is absolutely vital in terms of a future strategy for sustainable film in Scotland. I'm keen to explore a little about how central and local Government supports your work and the film sector in general. Having heard from John and the previous committee's evidence sessions, I know that things have moved on. In relation to Creative Scotland, our advisers tell us that their guide film in Scotland indicates where there's film studio space available but doesn't provide contact details for the regional film officers. That surprised me quite a bit. I was curious to know if that was symptomatic of a wider problem or simply a blip in somebody's preparation of a website. On Creative Scotland's website, all the film location networks are listed through there. That may have been normally, but the working relationship between certainly the film liaison and the film offices is very strong, as is the referral scheme that links with them. Certainly from my local authority as a film liaison, without the support of Creative Scotland, there would be no way that A, that I was trained to be a film commissioner, and C, the support and the understanding of the local authority and the connections and the wider opportunities that that brings to our region are highly supported by that. In the last five years, we've had an increase in production that has been life changing for our communities. For example, this afternoon I'll go back to Aberdeen where we have a course of 40 young people on introduction to hit the ground running, which is the entry level runners courses. My communities have seen opportunities to have feature films filmed in their local towns. I've had a young person who's come back to film in his hometown as part of a professional crew. We've had young people who've told us that it's been life changing. We understand that the creative economy has a huge power within Scotland in some of our regions that creative economy is only lightly touching our regions. In the north-east of Scotland, film has changed that for us, but we need further support and investment to maintain that in a time when local authorities are having to make some strong choices. Is that a general view? Is it a robust and productive relationship? I would certainly agree from your point of view. We measure where our enquiries come from, and I would say that over a quarter of our enquiries get directed to us through Creative Scotland, so there's definitely good day-to-day work in relationship. There's no job I do that does not have a direct line to Creative Scotland. The amount of support that they provide every production is hugely beneficial. They are the spine in a way. I actually view Creative Scotland as my colleague, so regardless of which production I'm working on with however many people, the fact that there's a direct line to Creative Scotland and that it actively benefits everything from my locations perspective is hugely rewarding. They're interested, they're informative, they're up-to-date, and they provide valuable assistance where needed. That's very encouraging. Can I follow up a point that Rosie Allison mentioned? I think that it's probably relevant, particularly to Marie and perhaps to Julie, since they're both in neighbouring regions. I think that you described it as a network of four film offices, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Highland and Fife and Tayside, and then a different concentric circle of other local authorities. Can you explain the difference between, for example, how you work in Fife and Tayside and how you work in Grampian? Well, I suppose that the idea of a dedicated screen office is different to the wider Scottish Locations Network, and there's a website, www.scotishlocationsnetwork.com, which actually directs towards Creative Scotland to the very page that has us all listed. But the people who have screen liaison duties, they will be part of a wider remit. They'll be, generally speaking, in economic development or possibly a culture department. Mostly, we find economic development and they will have wider duties concerning tourism, different kinds of business development, inward investment, that kind of thing. So the time that they have in offices that are not dedicated to this work is less. It doesn't mean to say that they don't provide a really valuable service, an absolutely crucial service to have coverage across Scotland, but the difference being that, with a dedicated screen office, we are encouraged, and certainly the councils of Angus Dundee, Fife and Perth, can also strongly encourage not just the idea of keeping a locations database and image bank and so on, but also of identifying all the local businesses that can benefit from screen production, of bringing together location owners and business owners to understand the business and engage with it. So I think you wanted to compare with Marie. In Abertein City and Shire, we work across the two local authorities. I'm partially funded by our cultural services department and a small amount of money from our economic development department to cover two days of my time to focus on film. So that's directly as on when we have productions contacting us, but also to build databases and information for productions and crew within the region. Additionally, since we've had an increase in production in the last five years, we've also had a tourism product that relates to screen, which then has added on to the workload of my liaison role. So each local authority will have a different set of skillsets behind their liaison officer. Some will have production understanding, some will be purely planners, marketing people, tourism, and my comment earlier about Creative Scotland. Five years ago, Creative Scotland made a leap of faith and trained some of the film liaison officers for the first time. That changed my ability to do my job and to understand what the needs of a production is coming. I jokingly say that when a production comes in, it's like watching a small army take over your community, except in a good way that can change a community becoming part of that army to make something really special. That role is unique. In the local authority, it requires a huge trust on an officer who may or may not be trained to do it, yet you're asking everything from the roads to clothes to your young people to being licensed to be in the film through to community's landscape changing. That requires a confidence of the local authority and a confidence of the production company in their liaison officer to be able to pull it off with them. That role is quite a difficult role when it's one person rather than the full screen commission. I happen to be in Macduff the day that happened recently, so I know what you mean. But it sounds to me as if you are as much a full-time person focused on this role as your colleague. No, it's two days a week as a film officer and three days a week as an arts development officer within my local authority. Obviously, I try and balance the two to the best of my sides of my posts. Thanks very much. Margaret Mitchell Just before I go on to my main question to pick up on something Julia said about creative Scotland location national film commission and film in Scotland, the directory, which was aimed to point film makers at what's happening with the network of local officers. It does say that, although studio space is available in Scotland, the guide does not provide the list or direct contact details on the regional film offices, so that seems quite a gap. Just talking about my local area, I have no idea, despite being in politics and elected member of various levels from local government, right up that there was a Lanarkshire screen location office there. Does it need more awareness raising? Also, to move on to my next point, you can be tackling together. There seems to be, now at Crossroads, a divide in which we are going. Are we going to more centralise the creative Scotland role and have it as an overview of deciding where things go, which you could be looked at? Or are we going to look at the local location offices as a gateway, beef them up a bit, give them more funding and encourage them to look at match funding so that they can do the kind of things that Dr Scott was talking about. I know that my local area co-bridge colleagues are doing amazing work in cosmetic, artistic or dramatic make-up, media study, all of those things that seems in education, beefing up the local economy. There are real opportunities, so which way should we be looking or is it a balance? If I can say from a Highland perspective, I think to an extent we've probably got the balance about right and we'd prefer not to see it go too much one way or the other. I think there's a need for the centralised resource because when we're trying to do things at a larger scale or whether we're going outside Scotland and trying to attract attention, people don't necessarily recognise the different parts of Scotland, they do recognise Scotland as a whole. On the other hand, when it comes down to a specific inquiry and they're saying what's that road like or who's the owner of that property, that's where your local knowledge that the local film offices have comes in. I think there needs to be a bit of both and I think personally anyway I think there'd be a bit of a concern if we're centralised nor but equally there may be risks in going the other way. Investing, so you have a Scotland-wide network of film liaison at the very minimum that is trained and supports Creative Scotland in the increase of film that we have had. Their role is unique for us all as our film offices. I couldn't promote my region to the scale that we can if we collectively promote together through Creative Scotland. Can I ask is that because of funding or because it isn't beefed up to that extent to cope with it but could it be? I mean the local one rather than just saying we don't have the resources, we know there's pressure on budgets but see we ought to make, wave a magic wand just for example the funding could be made available would that be the way to go? Would there be any disadvantages in that or could there be real opportunities? I think from my local authority because of the scale of filming that has happened in the last five years having the ability to put more time into our film office to actually proactively market it to work with Visit Scotland as a partner our regional visit and tourism partners to be able to tell those film tourism stories you could see an economic benefit come from that investment so there is an argument for that. I'd just like to say I think Creative Scotland has a different role to the local authorities. Creative Scotland is very much a kind of central pool and they are out there in the world selling Scotland as a whole. We as local authority services look inwards if you like. I spend an awful lot of time with various council officers and councillors convincing them that film and television are of benefit to the region whether that be through the tourism impact or the economic impact or the educational impact given opportunities for jobs and training. I don't think that it's of value for a local authority to suddenly go right, we are going to go out on our own and promote our local authority region when that can be done as a central resource and is being done very well. Very well indeed by Creative Scotland who go out to the United States, they've been to Korea, they go to Europe fairly regularly and sell Scotland as a whole, which helps people to come and look at Scotland and see that we have this huge range of locations. The other thing to point out is that each local authority doesn't have a huge range of locations. I can't offer in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders and the Slothian, I can't offer jiggity jaggedy mountains as you've got in the Highlands, we just don't have them, but I'm very happy to refer people to the Highlands film office and to Julie for some of the essential Perthshire mountains if they're looking for that kind of thing. Having this central resource in Creative Scotland is absolutely invaluable, but I think we work well, we could work better, there's no doubt about it. If every local authority had some kind of representation because I don't think it's the whole of Scotland that's covered at the moment. The panel here today is very focused on what we do. There are other film liaison officers who really don't even have a day to spend on film, so there could be, there is a call for more even coverage to make sure that when Creative Scotland is out looking for responses and information about filming all over Scotland that they get responses from all over Scotland so that there is an even collation of statistics around Scotland so that when filmmakers go to shoot in the more remote areas of Scotland there's somebody in the council who can answer the phone rather than having to wait for a Wednesday in a week's time or something like that. Yeah, I just want to emphasise what Rosie's saying that I would say that one of the greatest parts of our job in Glasgow Film Office is having that relationship with other departments in the council to emphasise what filming can bring to the city and build those relationships so that they understand that when Creative Scotland has attracted a production to Scotland that we are able to follow up on what's been told to them, what can happen in a city or a region that we can put them in touch with the right people to make the things happen. Thank you very much. Is the bill worrying you still have to persuade councillors that the films of value to the local economy? Maybe we'll come back to that later. I should say just to put it on the record that prior to my elected department in 1999 I worked in the inward investment section of the economic development department of Dundee City Council and proposed that we set up Filmed on Dee so it's good to see that Tayskin are here today, which no doubt emerged out, hopefully, of Filmed on Dee and that fantastic initiative. My couple of questions goes back to Rosie Ellison's oatmeal remarks, if I picked her up correctly, which is that the spend in Scotland in 2015 that I think he said was £50 million were thereabouts, whereas in the UK it was £2 billion. My quick calculation, but someone will correct me if I'm wrong, is that about 2.5 per cent of expenditure is in Scotland, so that's not good enough, really. I would like to know the panel's views on why we have such a little share of the UK's expenditure in film. What support do we get from the private sector? Be that whisky companies are commissioning very expensive adverts in higher advertising agencies, hopefully Scottish ones but no doubt often London ones who then hire filmmakers in London, presumably. I don't know the detail but I wonder if that is a trend. How are we proactively selling Scotland overseas? A lot of the discussion today will be about what we can offer when film producers and companies come to Scotland, but how are we getting Scotland on to the radar screen of the industries in other countries around the world so that they actually think about Scotland in the first place? The 2 billion is spent entirely on location production, correct me if I'm wrong. I think there is a significant amount of that money spent on the kind of bricks and mortar services, the post-production, visual effects, animation, virtual reality, augmented reality and all of these other technologies that are coming along, and perhaps it's an appropriate moment to mention that. Margaret Mitchell, forgive me if I've got the protocol wrong, but you mentioned about funding. We've been in a position that the councils that I work for have supported applying for external funding and I'll come on to the point about post-production just immediately. We were originally funded with ERDF money, the local regional ERDF money. When we couldn't get that any more we moved on to interreg European Union money and we had an original project called North Sea Screen Partners. We've now done a new project called Create Converge and it concerns the need for a strategy and a policy for development of the sectors for post-production, animation, visual effects, virtual reality and all of those things which are firing headlong down in the south of England, but we're really not having development of those industries at sufficient speed here in Scotland in order to attract that kind of inward investment and spend. I'll leave the studio side out of it because that's been long and well debated, but I think it would be helpful if there were a strategy and a policy for development of those sectors in Scotland and it's certainly something that as a transnational project with nine partners in five countries we're very much trying to do our best to inform that policy. I could just like to say about the £2 billion, plus the majority of that is spent in studio productions, the majority of which are housed down south. There are loads of film studios around London, each with many many stages. Wales has now got about three, four complexes, each with several stages. This is where the money is being spent. In Scotland we have Ward Park studio which is brilliant, thank goodness we have this and other than that we have various sheds which get converted for a short period of time while the film uses it and then they're set back to normal and if an engineering firm wants to move in and take on the 10-year lease then it's off the market. My family thinks that Ward Park is not available to the wider film community, it is only Outlander's studio and even when they are on downtime it cannot be rented therefore it doesn't enter our sphere of studio space at all. That's one of the reasons we haven't been able to get more of the £2 billion that is available out there. We haven't got the studio infrastructure and increasingly we are seeing these kind of high value productions coming in and we had a 35% increase in inquiries from high value tv and feature films in the last year, all of which are looking for studio space. While they might come up here as the Avengers did and use our locations, which is fantastic, we're very very happy to have them here and for us to be able to then sell Scotland off the back of that, they spend a lot more money when they choose to base here and could spend, as Outlander does, nine months of the year filming, creating jobs for people, creating training opportunities for young people. I don't think that we're just calling for one studio, I mean what we have in Scotland is one studio with Outlander filling every stage going there. What we need is and what exists down south and the reason they're bringing in so much money is that there are a range of studios in different places to facilitate different kinds of productions, different sizes. Around Atlanta in Georgia there are I think it was 18 different studio complexes that are all around the city. They've created a film academy that trains crew to keep people local and to service the productions that come in. I mean that's another thing that's come up when talking about studio here. We could create all the studios in the world but we will also need to drive crew to work here and live here but this is one of the issues that we've had in Scotland with the kind of feast and famine industry where we have a splurge of production and then suddenly it goes quiet and the crew leave. It's difficult for people to sustain a career and this is something that was in the film sector review report from 2014. People have, there are a few like Laureate who have decided to stay and let's hope she stays. It's a fantastic track record but many do leave and go to London or elsewhere because the work hasn't been there. The hope is that if we can create studios and we have the continuance of the UK tax credit or similar plus incentive finance to cause productions to look at Scotland we can attract productions to stay here and to shoot over many many months hopefully many years giving careers and opportunities to people who want to live here. I think the basics is when a production comes over here an international production will come over and when they come they are looking for everything as Rosie says they want a studio but they also want their locations. The benefit of a studio is it provides weather cover and it also gives you flexibility. For example you might build the inside of a castle in a studio rather than try and do it in one of Historic Environment Scotland's properties. What happens more and more is that productions will come over and they will only come for the key locations they need because the studio does not exist so instead of us getting an entire production which will automatically result in employment locally and across the whole country we get this small amount people will bring in their entire crew because their production base is elsewhere where the studio exists so we don't see that in our reports we don't see the same amount of spend coming through and that's why people go gosh i didn't even realise such and such a production were in because they move quickly they shoot a location they take the entire crew and their own location in another country so with the studio we will be able to provide so much more in the way of jobs and benefit our economy dramatically. Excuse me problems is a continuity and consistency of funding one of the ways in which Screen Academy Scotland has engaged with the industry in addition to our degree programmes was through a project which was called Screen Nets which was funded through Creative Scotland with the the film skills fund that was made available by Scottish Government in 2016 announced in the autumn of 2015. This project has been very successful in terms of finding and developing young trainees and engaging those trainees with the high-end television productions that have come to the country but also with the the feature films that were made here last year that's a great way for developing trainees and giving them the skills that are needed for the incoming productions however that was that was a one-off that's that was just for that year and the lack of continuity is is a real problem if you're trying to build a sustainable industry if you're trying to get young people who are training or educated in in the skills necessary for the industry if you're going to allow them to to believe that they can have careers that are based here rather than have to look elsewhere and have to move south inevitably because there's this fracturing of of jobs available so finding a way of having a strategy that can make things more consistent is I think absolutely vital. Thanks very much Ross Greer. Thanks, convener. Just going back to the convener's original question the evidence that Ben Owens had given to the previous committee in session four this has been touched on site I think in answer to Lewis MacDonald but one of the things he mentioned was for those working in the sector particularly self-employed people to find employment the example used in Canada was of the provincial film commissions having live production lists on their website with dates of production with full contact details for folk to get in touch directly and that was boosting employment making it easier for people to get in and he recommended that for Scotland has that been developed since he gave that evidence in session four? Most productions don't want us to do that as a starting point. We would be in breach of confidentiality if we put details such as those kind of details on websites productions reach a certain point when they do want to start crewing up and at that point they will speak to those of us who have got lists of local crew and ask us to either put the message out to them for them to send in CVs and get in touch or we send the production company their CVs and put them in touch that way around but in terms of an online production list of forthcoming productions it doesn't happen at all. Can I just on that point because the point you raised about confidentiality was my first assumption when I read this but I couldn't think of why British Combo and Ontario would be so radically different to here for why is that working for them why has it been cited as a useful example but it wouldn't work here because I had the same thought as you about confidentiality. If I can add from our point of view confidentiality is certainly one issue I think the other side that we see from some of the production companies is that whether in a relatively remote area it might be okay they could make it a bit clearer what they're doing and where when you get to some of the more populated areas I think there's a concern that particularly for better known productions you'll get lots of people out to watch it it'll start interrupting them actually undertaking the filming so I think they're kind of cautious about making things too public in that sense so going through likes of ourselves direct to the crew rather than putting it out too publicly seems to suit them better. Just highlighting film bang for production services and things in Scotland as well because obviously external productions get that shared with them as a website but also were given the actual paper directories when they come into the country and just from my perspective when we talk about crew it could be as specific as having the TV aerial man locally hired rather than brought in to remove all the aerials for whisky galaw and put them back up every night so you know when we say crew I think we need to think about the professional film crew but also the crew that is used on the ground within those communities and that does come down to local knowledge and who's the best and who's going to turn upon the job on time. Thank you. Thanks very much Stuart McMillan. Thank you. The issue of the film studios. Obviously a few examples have been provided thus far and also that there has been the situation in Scotland but surely film studios are owned predominantly if not solely by private businesses as compared to the state. Is that not the case in elsewhere as well? Yes. In other countries in Europe that we deal with through our European projects they are places like Arhus for example in Denmark, Central Denmark they saw it as a real help to create a publicly funded studio and although it's not the most glamorous of studios but it's certainly a fully functioning very large studio and they found that's helped them to bring in quite a lot of the sort of scandic noir productions that have been going. I think it's where there might be a market failure. One of the challenges for studios is finding a studio operator. Really there's not that many studio operators and increasingly Pinewood as a business is tending to want to do more of a kind of what they call a dry hire than a wet hire situation which means that they will basically allow or do a deal with companies like Disney to take over some of the stages on a sort of full maintenance basis bringing in all their own crew and so on that they're really only responsible for keeping the place wind and water tight as opposed to in the old days where these studios would have you know perhaps several hundred of their own staff to support productions so they as I said but comes back to this thing of the challenge of finding enough of the appropriate operators to run studios and also operators in typically Pinewood would want quite a significant share of profits for example and quite a large fee in order to run studios let's say in Scotland that that's an element that might need perhaps initially some kind of government support. The reason I posed the question is because I've heard this morning and also heard before in this committee of the shortage of studio capacity in Scotland but if that studio capacity isn't near but if it's the operators or the film companies themselves if they don't actually want to invest in actually building a film studio in Scotland then is the argument that's coming from yourselves is the argument that the state should then go and fund studios in different locations within Scotland? We know that there are at least well there's a pentland studio on the table which is an entirely private sector project and here in the Edinburgh city region we are very grateful that the government gave it green light for planning permission in principle recently let's hope it goes through all the way. There are other proposals out there and people working together to try to get studios off the ground from our point of view the more the merrier really then we'll just need more crew to facilitate the productions here and that may take a long time as I understand it this is one of the difficulties when the private sector are looking to take on a studio project there's a high level of risk obviously and without us having a much larger crew base to service productions coming here it makes it a you know well that's part of the risk element of a studio development one of the things that works for other studios around the country and around the world is a studio complex that has other rent paying rates paying tenants around the side who can carry on paying the rent even if the studio is to stand empty for a few months and that's certainly that's something that the pentlands proposal has got within it there may be others that are built on that model certainly bristol has that Liverpool has that Manchester has that I don't know about the pinewood ones I'm not an expert in those well I think the difference is what you touched on right at the beginning is having extra fiscal incentives in Scotland and through the screen leadership group report there was the mention of the idea of VAT on cinema tickets being put into a film fund the reality is that any extra funding that can come to a production makes it very attractive to people looking where they're going to film around the world and if Scotland had that then it would be much more practical much more realistic for someone to want to invest in a studio in Scotland because then people would be accessing an extra fund so anything that can be done to add to the film funding would be terrific and I mean I think Scotland as a whole has been underdeveloped in its production businesses for a very long time and at the moment we've got the prospect of the new BBC Scotland channel which is the first bit of optimism we've had for a long time and I think from the screen leadership group report one of the things that I'd really like to see government taking on board is the BBC even now putting up an extra 40 million into Scotland every year 20 million for the channel 20 million for network production and the suggestion alongside that is the doubling of the funding for Creative Scotland and their film unit and that would bring us up to about the same level as Northern Ireland gets for their production and that to me is the big issue for government to be tackling in this area if you could get that right that would be a tremendous boost and if we missed the opportunity of this BBC Scotland channel which many in the rest of the BBC will be willing to fail they don't like the fact that money is coming to Scotland they want to see it collapse whereas the rest of us want to see it as something which is going to grow then my plea to you is to actually see in the letters you've written to Creative Scotland and the Scottish Enterprise you have told them they need to work together it's long overdue and what can Scottish Enterprise do for the screen businesses in Scotland to take advantage of the new channel that kind of growth is the important growth I think to see and if I just give an example of one company that has grown over the past 20 years what I think is a sort of perfect way Sigma Films Gillian Berry and David McKenzie started off making shorts paid for probably mostly by Scottish Green shorts like California Sunshine they made a low budget feature the Last Great Wilderness then David made Young Adam and starred up films gradually growing in scale he made his first Hollywood feature Helen Highwater and now in Scotland he is developing a 70 million Netflix production which is the kind of thing we'd love to see attracted in Scotland but this has been grown from within it's a story of Robert the Bruce the Outlaw King and that should be a huge boost to the economy we need more Sigmas we need more companies capable of developing those projects but they can't do it on thin air they need support I think you've touched on an important point there and I think Julie had mentioned earlier about support for post production as well the impression I'm getting from the evidence that received here reflects evidence that I hear from speaking to people in the industry and also from the cross party group on culture that I convene is that actually Creative Scotland is getting it right now but there's still a big question mark over what the enterprise agency Scottish enterprise is doing would you say that was reasonable yes I think that it is very clear in the report what needs to happen the film unit which has been proposed for Creative Scotland needs to be given the chance to grow but it can't when Scottish Green was set up all the ambition was there 20 odd years ago but there wasn't the funding it couldn't be done this is an opportunity to take to put the funding into it if you can't make it work off the back of the the bbc's investment which has been the investment that's been denied us for so many years then we never will yes support angle and I think if we maybe move away from film for a moment just as an example in the area I'm from and around Inverness there's been some investment in the life science sector but that was only kick started by there being some public investment and that's then starting to give this kind of cluster effect and I think in a sense what we're looking at here is saying the industry might not jump in and take the risk themselves but if the public sector supports that initial phase then the industry will come in and the cluster effect will see it grow and take over itself so it's maybe just that kick start that it's needing rather than necessarily that something has to be publicly run well into the future. Richard Lochhead did you want to come back in? Yes, I'm really excited with the idea of a Netflix series on Robert the Bruce played by Chris Pine although I would have been available myself for Robert the Bruce of course. You mentioned John Archer in terms of the public agencies working together and I wanted to ask Lorette Dunner a question about that in terms of the Team Scotland approach to making Scotland's locations and facilities available to productions. So there's a case in my constituency which I'm kind of trying to pursue where we've got a former RAF base, RAF can loss, which is a massive site, largely unused by the army that moved in. Therefore we've got all this spare infrastructure and capacity and many people have told me that that'd be an ideal location for film work, you know empty hangars, lots of space etc and on the border of the islands. So do you feel there is a Team Scotland approach because when I raised that with the MOD they didn't object to the idea but they weren't exactly full of enthusiasm and they were more inclined to think of the problems as opposed to the opportunities. So I just wondered whether you felt there was a Team Scotland approach to making it easy for filming to happen in Scotland? It's an interesting question. Some days I would have said yes and other days I say no. It depends on which direction I find myself travelling. If we're talking about the MOD I have to say I've filmed with them fairly extensively in the last few years and I find that even in that period of time they've become very much more focused on bringing in new business and that includes filmmakers. So doors which were once firmly closed have started to open there. It's interesting, every production differs as you can imagine from every other one. I find when I work within, as I always do within the country, although Creative Scotland, as I was saying earlier, is a key factor to me, all the regional offices are incredibly important as well. So knowing that wherever in Scotland I'm aiming for there is somebody there to help facilitate that and who also has experience and that I think is the key, it's the experience. And that experience helps the doors open but also there's an underlying current whole time of the fact that these regional offices are moving forward, that almost every day they are opening the eyes to another new business or another new landowner that filming is a possibility and it is a bringer of investment of however short term. So I see it as positive. I think Team Scotland, I would probably say yes. I think that there is a strong feeling of let's make this happen, you know, filmmaking, TV making, whatever level we're on, it brings jobs and it brings good things. Stuart McMillan, I think you wanted to come back in. It was a separate question on a different area, if that's okay. I accept that the film industry is a global industry and various factors and elements will come into play on a regular basis. In terms of political change that happens and also the question certainly within Scotland and UK regarding the European Union position and some EU funding has been touched upon earlier on, have any of you had any discussions with the public bodies regarding the potential outcome post the UK leaving the European Union and how do you think it would actually affect what you're trying to do in Scotland? That's largely because I have a European role within Highland Council as well as the film one. I think in short we see there will be some impact on any form of business, partly due to uncertainty, partly due to potential changes in access to markets and that might affect things like collaborative projects but I think it's fair to say that we haven't honed in specifically on the film industry and looked at whether there'll be any impacts there that won't apply to other sectors. As an office that's benefited significantly from European funding, obviously it is a concern going forward as to what, if anything, will replace that opportunity. We're not saying replace that funding but replace the opportunity because currently we're in a position to be able to coordinate and assemble projects that apply to schemes such as Horizon 2020, to European Union, the creative fund that they operate as well as to various interregs. Unless we get, I suppose, some kind of Norwegian-type deal in the future, I don't know what people feel about a Norwegian-type deal but if it was something like that that would enable us still to apply for funding but even when Norway is involved in projects they're not able to access, to my understanding, the central EU money. They've got to, in effect, match it with their own government money. It's just that they're part of the same scheme if you like so I think it is a concern but I'm afraid I don't have answers as to what the future might look like. Creative Europe is another place to go to, to get funding, development funding and production funding and our most successful production in that it's sold to 30 countries around the world is a story of film and the initial funding for that was a development grant from the media programme which is now Creative Europe. Whether that money remains for screen production and screen development is the question that producers have because obviously the money comes from us to begin with so if we're no longer part of Creative Europe will that money come to Creative Scotland? Will it go to the BFI or will it just be siphoned off elsewhere? Only about 4% of the inquiries and the productions that we get in the region are our drama, high value dramas. The rest of it is documentaries and corporates and light attainment and so on and these come in from all over from Scotland, from the UK, from Europe, the States, all over the place and it's that kind of production which may be affected by Brexit. I mean if there are increasing tariffs to get here then that might have an impact. As for the American productions coming in well they would pay tariffs anyway at the moment and the weak pound is making the UK an attractive place to come at the moment. I have a colleague in the film office in Kent who has reported something that's come up from Brexit in that they had a long running Netflix series that operated both in Kent and across in France and they lost it due to the risks of Brexit but we haven't here experienced any loss yet as a result of the possible future so it is still hard to say how exactly we'll play out. You talked about interreg and I was just wondering for some of the other bodies as well how big a feature that's played in your operations and if that will be a big hit for you. Glasgow film office was a European funded project from 1990 to 2008 then with the increase of the European Union around the same time the funding ended and since that point our staff has been reduced from six to two and we're now fully funded by Glasgow City Council. We don't have any direct funding in Highland that goes into the film office but on the other hand I think there are impacts in a sense in a secondary sense so we rely on some infrastructure for productions that have perhaps has perhaps been funded by European money in the past so they're even if not direct to the film office I think there's still an impact from funding side. Some of our productions have had money through the leader programme but that's the only connection at the moment. One of our postgraduate talkmasters programmes is a partnership with a university in Portugal and a university in Estonia and is funded through the Erasmus scheme so clearly how that is impacted will have an impact on one of the programmes. Does anyone else want to come in at that point? I find that we get beyond the original ERDF it's not really been absolutely directly and solely for the functions of the screen office we've had to if you'd like explore other opportunities in order to attract that kind of funding but that obviously the quid pro quo is we have to deliver on those projects and while we willingly do that obviously that does take time away from your sole focus on being a screen office. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're just about to wind up now but if there are any other issues that you would we have a little bit of time in hand if there are any other issues that haven't been raised with you that you think are important to your sector we have a few moments in hand that you can raise them. Connection of the film tourism side. Jenny Steele in Visit Scotland has been doing an amazing job promoting the products that we've had here in Scotland but as that increases that's going to mean increasing challenge for Scotland of how to use that resource and when that resource goes out to market that's another way of marketing our country has opened for film and you had raised whether film could be included in Scotland 2020 as part of that. I think it was Rosie who had mentioned in our discussions that she had not found a film particularly mentioned in the Scotland 2020 strategy. I'm not an expert on Scotland 2020. I'm certainly having tried to identify that myself it didn't seem to be the case. I was just going to add on the tourism side certainly in areas like the highland being featured in films has been a key driver of bringing visitors to the area but that in a sense then has potentially a negative impact on future filming some of the areas that have been really popular like the Isle of Skye we're now getting to the stage that film companies are interested in coming filming something else in Skye but Skye's so popular with the visitors that they can't get the accommodation for crew and so on while they're there so in the way these things are it's a nice problem to have we'd rather be busy than not busy but they can put pressure on infrastructure and I think that's probably quite typical of certainly all rural areas but equally I guess it's probably an issue on a seasonal basis in our cities and so on as well. Well actually we had a round table with the tourism industry last week and that was one of the issues that came up particularly in Glasgow in Edinburgh and we were told that there was a big international conference in Glasgow that Glasgow lost because they just didn't have enough high-end hotel accommodations so it's interesting if it's affecting your sector as well. Recently we've been making this film outlaw king that John had mentioned and there was an area in Scotland that we were particularly interested in filming in but we are not going there because we cannot quickly find accommodation for the crew. Right, where is it? It's actually, I'm sorry, it's an average integer. The one benefit of the oil downturn is actually we actually have to bear hotel rooms but we struggle to get crew in. It took every agency that we could to house the crew for whisky galore and for stone mouth and there's a future production that might be on the cards that I worry where we're going to house them. Okay, thank you very much for coming together your evidence today. Part of this process is for the committee to engage widely with the sectors in our remit so that we can discuss our work programme going forward. So if there are issues that are raised today we can then drill down later on in the next session to perhaps focus on particular issues affecting screens. So if there's anything that you would like to follow up on, you're very welcome to submit written evidence to us after today's session. Thank you very much. We're now going into private.