Animation Skills Fund: Use it or lose it!

Last week at the Children's Media Conference in Sheffield I hosted a panel discussion on the skills shortage and how the Animation Skills Fund, administered by ScreenSkills is trying to help. I want to share what we were talking about, as it’s a vitally important part of sustaining the strength of our industry.

With so many universities and private courses offering animation training, why do we need a skills fund? Because skills are the number one problem faced by studios. Ultimately skills shortages lead to productions going overseas, which causes a downward spiral of talent drain. Our industry cannot exist without talent.

This shortage has stemmed from a combination of booming streaming-fuelled industry, and the animation tax-reliefs introduced through AnimationUK’s lobbying (which my colleague & fellow BZ co-founder Oli Hyatt set up) which is great for everyone and has the growth no end in sight, so with this and Brexit looming, the problem is only going to get worse.

How is the fund, er funded? Well, studios who receive government money from the tax-relief or the new Young Audiences Contest Fund are asked to pay 0.5% of their production budget into the fund. This fund's expenditure used to be match funded by the government, but in the midst of austerity, this tap was turned off, leaving it down to the studios to continue.

Why on should the studios cough up their hard-earned monies and give up a part of their very tight budget? Good question! There are multiple benefits, some you see now, some you’ll see the future. Some of it is altruistic, some of it is just a fight for survival for our industry.

 Having a skills fund where studios pool together means it’s not government money, so doesn’t have the limitations of the glacially paced speed of implementation and endless bureaucracy.

Well that’s the theory, but the skills fund has been running for a few years since the inception of the tax-reliefs, but the momentum faltered and money stopped being spent, meaning studios didn’t want to pay into it…why would you if it’s not being spent?

To help kick-start it again, I was invited to join the Animation Skills Council and Chair it, which is responsible for raising and spending the fund. So now we are trying to do just that, with a council is made up of volunteers from animation studios all across the UK. It’s a huge undertaking to make sure it’s spent wisely, which takes time to get back off the ground.

When we re-booted the fund at the start of the year, the very first thing we did was fund the Animated Women UK’s Helen North Achieve programme, a career development initiative to help give training and support to career progression. This initiative is a perfect example of a programme to help boost skills, which would not have been funded if it wasn’t for studios working together.

So today we are at a point where the fund has a quarter of a million pounds to spend on skills training, but we want to make sure that money seeds a self-sustaining fund, demonstrating the real change we can make through collaboration.

Why can’t studios just do their own thing? Lucky if you are big enough and have the money! But that leaves out a huge majority of the industry which is made of small studios and 50% of the whole industry who are freelancers. Looking after yourself sets a precedent which is then followed by others, and society needs less of that. Big studios need to encourage and lead collaboration.

We can do so much more with strength in numbers. By working together as an industry with joined-up training initiatives, we avoid wasting duplication of each studio doing their own thing in isolation. We can make sure we fairly cover all parts of the skills pipeline, from schools outreach to career development for experienced staff. And not just locally to where is geographically easy, but across the whole of the UK to make sure we’re not leaving any talent untapped and left out.

A common complaint was the fund doesn’t work, or the money is just going round in circles, with companies contributing and then just taking the money back out to subside activities, minus some admin expenditure. Totally pointless. And this is what we want to change. We want to create initiatives that studios can’t do alone. We don’t want to re-invent wheel, by subsidizing existing courses, as ScreenSkills run a bursary program which the BFI contributed half a million pounds towards to do just this.

But the initiatives do work, previously the fund has paid for a fresh Storyboarding course run through Lupus Films which helped many storyboard artists gain employment across the industry. We are also planning a “Back-To-School” initiative, where the fund will pay for and help organize juniors artists from studios across the UK to travel back to their school to give an inspiring talk about how a dream career can easily become reality. Routinely the best artists are the ones who have been practicing in their bedroom since early years; we need to ensure they don't slip away. There are lots more ideas along the same lines, but we can’t implement them alone.

So let's work together, to up-skill the whole industry to keep the UK at the forefront of animation on a very competitive world stage. We may be starting small with the fund but with everyone’s help, we can use the gaining momentum to demonstrate what we can do together, and help push our industry to even greater heights.

How can you get involved? If you are a producer or studio exec, you can help champion the productions contributing to the fund, as without this it will not exist in a few years time and we will be back to square one. If you work as an artist or in production there are great training opportunities available! Follow ScreenSkills on social media and subscribe to the AnimationUK newsletter to find out more about how to sign up for upcoming initiatives and events.

Vitally, we also need help to run the fund! We’re looking for someone with lots of industry connections to help implement and grow the fund, the role is for two days a week (apply via the link below) so please help spread the world!

https://www.screenskills.com/vacancies/animation-production-liaison-executive/17084/

Finally, thank you to everyone who helped in the discussion last week: Kate O'Connor (AnimationUK), Adam Jackson-Nocher (Lupus Films), Sarah Tanner (Jellyfish Pictures) and Helen Piercy (Animated Women / Norwich University of the Arts). And thanks to Greg Childs at CMC and Grace Hebditch at Blue Zoo for making it all happen! ??