A little time and distance has helped define the Marmite decision to axe the UK Film Council. The ‘love it’, ‘hate it’ camps have pitched and not surprisingly, Facebook is forefront with the ‘Save the UK Film Council’ campaign and (as I type) over 45,000 supporters.

Elsewhere in webland the digital world is alive with debate. The Blogosphere is afire and Tweeters roar. The ‘loud and proud’ cheer the decision, the indignant are digging in.

Jeremy Hunt himself has come out fighting, with his response in this weekend’s Observer newspaper,

It is simply not acceptable in these times to fund an organisation like the UK Film Council, where no fewer than eight of the top executives are paid more than £100,000.

In fact four of those eight earn even more than the Prime Minister, and that’s before he awarded himself a 5% pay cut.

One element that appears to gain support from both sides is that the decision to axe the UKFC was made without discussion. So between now and the wind up of the Film Council by 2012, what’s to happen?

Jeremy Hunt offers some reassurances, that the tax credit will remain and lottery funding will increase. But what help for independent producers looking to secure screen time for their films? The Film Council were supposed to deal with this issue with the creation of the Digital Screen Network, much applauded and anticipated when the scheme began. At last we would have a network of 240 digital screens around the nation, contracted to programme ‘specialised’ (non-mainstream) content. Finally the independents had an exhibition network to exploit. However it didn’t turn out that way, as the costs associated with ‘digital security’ pushed this new network way out of reach. And when 3D films came along these projectors were pretty much commandeered.

So where now? One argument comes for the writer/producer Jonathan Gems in a letter to Jeremy Hunt’s office. In it he advocates a return to protections which would reserve 15% of the UK film market for UK films. You can read the full text of his letter here.

Myself, I have mixed feelings about the axing, having had some success but many rejections within the auspices of the Film Council’s remit. Whilst never being directly involved with the Film Council itself we have here at Amulet Films received much benefit and support via the regional screen agencies, Screen South & Screen East. Happily, it seems, these regional agencies are to remain in place. We did once however, receive a call directly from the Film Council – at last, we thought, we’ve arrived. They wanted a copy of our latest short film, Moth. We’d been popping up all too frequently on film festival programmes and ‘word’ had seeped within their walls. They wanted “to keep an eye on things” and I mailed them a DVD that very day – never heard a word since or will ever now.

In the end we felt that the doors were shut tight and the more we knocked, the more closed the shop. Ho hum…

But what, I demand – rattling my light sabre, will become of the invaluable Research and Statistics Unit? I do like a good statistic, such as 80% of funding applications to the Film Council are rejected. (Source, Film Council FAQ’s)

Just arrived back in the office, direct from the airport, following a three week trip to the US. Feeling very tired and was about to settle down to flick through the recently released 2010 Statistical Yearbook, published earlier this month. However, also just heard the the DMCS has abolished the UK Film Council…

… Bombshell…!

The UK Film Council have just released their production statistics for the first quarter of the year. Although these are only 1st quarter figures it’s still interesting to look at what has happened here in the UK since the introduction of the new tax credit system in 2006 and the credit crunch hit in late 2007.

Overall, production has been moving down but it’s quite clear that the change to the film tax credit system has had the biggest impact on co-productions, with far fewer now being made. The spike in production in 2006 is probably the result of producers rushing to take advantage of the old tax relief system (sections 42 & 48) before the new tax credit system came into place.

Looking at the spend  below we see that although 2010 (£426.5m) is lower than last year (£485.1m) both years are considerably higher than in recent years. However, this increase is fundamentally down to ‘inward investment’ films, films which are substantially financed and controlled from outside the UK such as Harry Potter.

Looking specifically at the spend on UK independent films in Table 3, it shows that investment has been declining since 2006 but again this is mainly due to the far fewer co-productions under the current tax credit system. We also see a dip in production in 2005 as producers are wary/unsure of the proposed change and then the spike in 2006 as they push through before April 1st deadline and the outgoing system.

As for the credit crunch, well the pinch has been mainly felt by the small independent producers. Last year saw a record year at the UK box office with it breaking through the £1b barrier for the first time, very much enhancing cinemas ‘recession proof’ image. This is again reflected for the 1st quarter of 2010 with admissions up 6% on the same period last year. This boom however is only really enjoyed by the major studios, driven by some major releases such as Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and the appetite for 3D.

Avatar’s success at the box office was also mirrored in its Blu-ray release last week. 2.7m units were sold in a mere 4 days, making it the highest selling Blu-ray title. The previous record was held by The Dark Knight with a total of 2.5m units but taking 16 months to amass those sales!

Over the last few months we’ve been working away on our website, trying to bring it up to date with a more dynamic and contemporary design. The updates apply only to the backend, the place where all our project pages and shop lie. The Flash frontend will remain as is.

As you’ve probably noticed from the new look to the blog, the updates to our website are now complete. In fact, integrating the blog fully into the website was the catalyst for the whole upgrade in the first place. Previously the blog sat just alongside our site, with an independent theme, albeit influenced by the colour scheme of the main site. Our blog is powered by WordPress and hosted on our own servers. Although WordPress is powerful and very easy to use, integrating it into our website meant getting into the heart of the WordPress .ccs (Cascading Style Sheets) and effectively building our own WordPress theme. Below is the ‘before & after’ showing how the blog has been enveloped by our main site.

The design for the new site has been influenced by the current wave of ‘tabbed’ browsing that has been adopted by the main web browsers. As you navigated around the website the tabs top right will change to reveal content specific to that particular area of the site. All the code has been written conforming to W3C (World Wide web Consortium) standards and here’s the verification page for this very blog.

The update has taken a little longer than expected but then I didn’t fully realise just how many pages our website contained. There are over a 100 pages in our News Archive alone. Before blogging became our news tool of choice, the old archive was our own way of spreading the word.

Also, check out the new ‘Movie Soundtrack’s’ widget on the sidebar. You can listen to some great themes whilst reading or buy and download to your device from Amazon.

Anyway, we hope you like the update and hopefully more film news soon.

Additional tweeks to our website have continued, mostly minor corrections and the squishing of bugs. Some recent additions include the Crew Photo for Ghosthunter and our Newsletter Signup is now back online. If you’re interested in subscribing to our (very) occasional newsletter, you can do so here.

Further updates to the project pages of our website are now online. Here we have the new Ghosthunter and The Essay pages, to accompany the Moth and Shop pages uploaded earlier this month.

Ghosthunter was our first 35mm film made with around £150,000 worth of industry sponsorship. The Essay is an early 16mm film that was great fun to shoot. More details of each can be found within the relevant pages.

It’s surprising how our website has grown over recent years and there is still much to update. The objective right now is to get each of the project pages online as time permits, then follow up on some of the minor updates. So apologies if there are one or two ‘Coming Soon’ messages around the website.

We’ve been slowly working on updating the backend of our website. The backend is where the individual projects pages and online shop are located. This update has been long overdue, the old backend was somewhat tired and out of kilter with today’s more dynamic websites. The new pages use the established Amulet colour scheme and improves on the overall design, structure and navigation. The pages are written using dynamic CSS and conforming to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. Here’s our validation results.

The update will take place in stages as time permits but as of now the Shop and Moth pages are up and running. We hope you like it

The Cinema Advertising Association have now released figures for last year, showing that despite a record box office breaking through the £1b barrier– admissions were a little short of the 2002 record. 73,461,334 tickets were sold leaving the year 2,441,202 tickets short of 2002. However, you have to go all the way back to 1971 to find another year which beats last years attendance.

The record box office takings are due to the increased premium (around £2) charged by cinemas for films showing in 3D. Last year the average ticket cost £5.18, this year cinemas are charging around £7 for 3D movies.

December’s admissions tally was very much helped by the success of Avatar, which is well on course to overtake James Cameron’s last film, Titanic, as the highest grossing film of all time. Titanic’s final gross around the world was $1.842bn, currently Avatar stands at $1.42bn after only 4 weeks on general release – remarkable.

As we close down for the Christmas break I see that Santa is well a truly on his way. Currently he’s in Neuschwanstein, Germany and is well on course to park by our chimney around midnight. Check out his progress at Norad Santa and watch some of the videos of him as he arrives at various landmarks around the world.

As well as catching up with family and friends, food and much festive good cheer we’ll be busy watching all the screeners that pop through our letter box at this time. Awards season is in full swing and we’ve a hefty pile of DVD’s to get through. This year there seem to be many more than usual but highlights so far include The Hurt Locker, Funny People, An Education and Star Trek (great performance from Karl Urban as the young Bones) and of course the animated movie Up, especially in 3D. However, we’ve much more to see and some I’m especially looking forward to.

In the meantime we wish all a very Merry Christmas and an even happier New Year.

Digital exhibition took a giant leap forward last week with the announcement from Odeon (the UK & Europe’s largest exhibitor) that it is to convert its entire estate of screens to digital. This amounts to 1802 screens at 202 sites across seven European countries.

Currently, Odeon operate 187 digital screens in the UK, out of a total of 834. Many of these have been provided through the Film Council’s Digital Screen Network program. The Film Council set aside £12m to get the digital network rolling a couple of years ago. With the roll out of projectors completed in 2007, the UK’s digital screen count has remained around 300. This new £70m of investment into Odeon’s estate will make a significant impact, especially as other exhibitors will no doubt be anxious to keep up.

Digital technology offers significant benefits to producers, distributors, exhibitors. Fundamentally, the cost savings involved with printing and distributing a traditional 35mm film print. Plus the added benefit of screening additional content to filmgoers such as 3D, opera, sport, ballet and concerts.

Coupled with the BBC looking at broadcasting some of the 2012 London Olympics in 3D, we could well be watching the opening ceremony, live in 3D, at our local multiplex.