| Foundation for professional training in cinema and audiovisual media | |
| INDEX > FOCAL – 20 years | Deutsch — Français |
It all began in the 1980s, with the gradual decline of “New Wave” cinema after a reign of over twenty years...reflecting the cultural spirit of the day. Audiences were increasingly attracted to films produced by Hollywood...reflecting the profit-making spirit of the day. The entertainment industry became an accelerated-growth realm, with the fight for markets taking on a global dimension.
In a parallel development, ever more new industrial sectors (tourism, services, research, etc.) began resorting to audiovisual supports. Visual communication became a key factor for promoting products.
And, finally, the development of new technologies, the digitizing of the postproduction chain and then of production itself, all made as yet not-altogether-mastered possibilities available to the professionals.
The filmmaking community came to realize that the synergy it enjoyed with the society of the 1970s and its concerns no longer sufficed to ensure a public for its films. This meant that, no matter how central to the issue the question of a chronic shortage of funding remained, other issues to do with skills and professionalism were at stake.
The Foresight of the Founders
This then was the context in which FOCAL (Foundation for Professional Training in Cinema and Audiovisual Media) came into being, in June 1990. The originality of the Swiss branch was to conceive of FOCAL as an umbrella organization—that is, as national in level and held in common by all the professional associations, independently from the industry’s private interests. FOCAL’s training programs cover the entire production chain: scriptwriting and development, production, markets and royalties, directing, rehearsals, acting, animated film, image technique, sound and lighting, postproduction, distribution and film releases, together with all the new technologies in the realm of film.
The branch’s second originality was that of endowing its training element with a legal status, that is creating a non-profit public interest foundation capable of evolving on its own. Concretely, the board of directors and executive committee are made up in the main of delegates from the professional associations.
Thirdly, and equally originally, it sought out the major share of its funding from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (OFC), whose goals include supporting the cinema. This has meant that from the start FOCAL was linked to the cultural realm rather than to that of education in the academic sense of the word. By the same token, this has enabled it to obtain global funding for its activities rather than backing project by project. The overall result comes across in FOCAL’s ability to conceive of a training policy on a long-term basis, accumulating experience and learning from its mistakes, and to thus continue investing in the development of new projects and unprecedented training models.
The above-mentioned three parameters have gained FOCAL the film industry’s consideration; its pragmatism and closeness to the needs of the professionals are highly appreciated. Its accomplishments are not the effect of a “top to bottom” trickle policy; rather, they are a true reflection of the factual evolution of the audiovisual and film production fields on the whole.
In its twenty years of existence, FOCAL has produced and co-produced 3,700 training days belonging to over 700 events (seminars, workshops, colloquiums, etc). The satisfaction of the participants in said events, in terms of how useful the training has been to their professional development, comes to over 90%.
Interestingly, a study covering fifteen years of FOCAL activity shows that 26% of the film projects developed in one or another of its scriptwriting workshops have actually become films. Moreover, of the films produced in Switzerland, a great number have been made by professionals who benefitted from attending FOCAL workshops to which, as they themselves proclaim, they are highly indebted for the necessary skills.
A most impressive and positive result indeed!
Meanwhile in Europe
Over the last two decades, a plethora of basic and continuous training courses in the audiovisual realm have come into being in Europe. The only study carried out to date on the subject, commissioned by the MEDIA programme in 2003 1, lists over 540 training courses (basic, university-level, continuous, etc) initiated in 32 European countries. An appreciable number!
Narrowing the focus to continuous training for film industry professionals reveals that, since 1990, the MEDIA programme has provided financial support to some 50 training course projects, amounting altogether to around 500 days of training for about 1500 professionals — mainly for producers, directors and scriptwriters.
The general goals pursued by these training organizations can be summarized as follows:
To help consolidate the branch and endow it with a competitive edge, to further develop cinematographic and audiovisual creation and to strengthen the overall quality and diversity of both fields.
To lend support to the professionals of today and tomorrow in their striving to develop their talents and their managerial, technical and creative skills.
To reinforce networking and interaction among professionals.
To ensure the continuity and transmission of the relevant know-how from one generation to the next.
The financial investment involved in these training programmes currently amounts to about 6 Mio Euros granted annually by MEDIA, in addition to an equal sum contributed by other backers and the participants. All in all, a total of ca. 12 Mio Euros a year.
Opinions vary whether much or little has been accomplished, whether the results are quailtatively good or bad, but undeniably much effort has gone into professionalizing the audiovisual field over the last 20 years.
During those same 20 years, moreover, the share of European films on the European market has remained disturbingly constant (about 7%), whereas the number of films produced annually in Europe has doubled — from 500 to almost 1000 today. Investment in the production of those feature films amounts to some 2.5 Bio Euros a year.
By comparison with the amount invested in production, investment in continuous training comes to barely 0.5%. A modest figure indeed.
Training and production
Does this stagnation in the share of European films on the market have to do with the training being offered? Those of the half-empty-glass school will say it proves the uselessness of continuous training. Yet those who see the glass as half full believe the European film scene would be even worse off without such endeavours, among others, in the training realm.
As to the future, almost everyone agrees on the necessity of consolidating the European film industry. Besides funding on behalf of production and distribution, such consolidation is linked to three factors that we feel have everything to gain from continuous training:
1. Improved film project development. Granted that the screenplay remains the cornerstone of a film’s quality — even perhaps of its box office appeal — at stake here are the skills of the producers, author-directors and scriptwriters, in conjunction with how they interrelate. Such interaction is a sensitive and complex matter to which continuous training has much to contribute. Note that such training must be highly attentive to adapting its contents, forms and pedagogical methods to today’s changing professional profiles: Until recently the “specialists” hired for project development projects served almost as substitutes for the “creative producer” (i.e. expert and author work together, with the producer being informed of their conclusions on the last day of that process). Nowadays, such experts must involve themselves far more in the exchange between author and producer. In the last analysis, it is the latter two who are called upon to resolve the equation, and who are thus expected to possess the necessary skills to carry out their mission. From psychotherapist to marriage counsellor!
2. A constantly high technical film quality level. The European public has come to expect the technical standards (image, light and sound) boasted by major American productions. It is all the more important for the European film industry to remain on the cutting-edge technically at a time when an ever growing number of screens are sprouting up, and access to production knows almost no limits (everyone does their film over their mobile phone). Throughout its history, the film industry has both stimulated and integrated technical discoveries. In other words, technology is both constitutive of, and constituent to, filmmaking. Today’s challenge lies with HD; tomorrow it will lie elsewhere. Hence it is important for continuous training to unflaggingly integrate the technical dimension of filmmaking, the know-how; it should be the realm where professionals have opportunity to (re)adapt their practices.
3. The pooling of energy. Filmmaking involves a number of disciplines and many, often contradictory, interests. Cooperation on behalf of a given film is a complex and paradoxical undertaking, akin to a tightrope act. And this within an ever more global context. Thus all those called upon must contribute their share of both goodwill and expertise. Continuous training is propitious to encounters, to networking, to launching and developing ideas; it enables the questioning of models, viewpoints and work methods and encourages the exploration of alternatives. In a nutshell, it represents a source of pooled energy.
The mission ahead is appealing. But it is also sensitive. It will take intellectual application, inventiveness and daring to adapt or develop training courses that take the above-mentioned factors into consideration. Nor must we forget that “Continuous training is an exception to the rule, a temporary distancing from our daily activity. The challenges it presents cannot be ambitious enough. Training is not meant to be comfortable, nor to offer a didactic-pedagogical pillow for the lazy 2.
Et que ce petit bout d'histoire continue…
Pierre Agthe
1 ‹Study of Continuous Training for Audiovisual Professionals in 32 European Countries› (Olsberg/ SPI, 2005) >back to text
2 Siegfried Zielinski in one of his speeches on the occasion of a FOCAL seminar >back to text
Originally published in french and german in the FOCAL Program 2010/1
Download as PDF (French/German original version)
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