The creative sustainability of screen business in the Australian regions

ABSTRACT

Public focus on screen business in Australia has been shaped by the information needs of the regulatory and content investment agencies that monitor and support screen content made under the creative control of Australians. This has meant that available data has concentrated on the types of content that have been deemed to require regulatory support – feature films, documentaries and television drama, with more recent interest in short-form content intended for streaming and online platforms and games. The expansion of the notion of screen business has led to a series of Screen Australia reports that focused the debate on value frameworks that included cultural, economic and audience values. These reports informed the 2017 Federal Government inquiry into the Australian Film and Television Industry – they do not, however, provide insights into how screen business is incorporated into localised regional economies and they tend to downplay the cultural contributions from the television and advertising sectors. By looking at screen business in four regional Australia cities we demonstrate how four modes of screen production, which include commercial and corporate content, is being made sustainably in the regions and that regional screen content production activities are an important part of the national screen production ecosystem.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative industries
• screen production
• film-making
• television
• film production

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Associate Professor Susan Kerrigan in Communication and Creative Industries at the University of Newcastle, Australia is a screen production scholar. She was co-investigator on the Filmmaking Research Network grant, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is Chief Investigator on Australian Research Council Grant investigating the creative industries. Susan has professionally produced and directed Australian television programmes, including Play School. See more detail at: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/susan-kerrigan

Associate Professor Mark Ryan, publishing as Mark David Ryan, is an Associate Professor in film and screen and a Chief Investigator for the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC). He is an expert in screen industries research, Australian genre cinema, genre film studies, and digital media. He is a Chief Investigator of various funded research projects and research fellowships including the ARC Linkage Project, Australian Cultural & Creative Activity: A Population & Hotspot Analysis. He was the President of the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (SSAAAZ) between 2015 and 2018 and an Executive Member of Australian Screen Producers Education and Research Association (ASPERA) in 2015/2016.

Professor Phillip McIntyre worked creatively for a number of years in the music industry as a songwriter, performer, producer, engineer, music journalist and video maker before moving into academia. He now researches at the University of Newcastle NSW where he also teaches sound production and media theory. He is the author of three books including Creativity and Cultural Production: Issues for Media Practice (2012) and is chief investigator on an Australian Research Council Grant entitled Creativity and Cultural Production: An Applied Ethnographic Study of New Entrepreneurial Systems in the Creative Industries of the Hunter Valley NSW. For more detail see: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/phillip-mcintyre

Stuart Cunningham AM is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology. A fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Member of the Order of Australia, his most recent books are Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley (with David Craig) (New York University Press, 2019), Media Economics (with Terry Flew and Adam Swift) (Palgrave, 2015), The Media and Communications in Australia (edited, with Sue Turnbull) (Allen & Unwin, 2014), Hidden Innovation: Policy, Industry and the Creative Sector (Lexington Books, 2014 and University of Queensland Press, 2013), and Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (with Jon Silver) (Palgrave 2013). Forthcoming is Creator Culture: Studying the Social Media Entertainment Industry (edited, with David Craig) (New York University Press, 2021).

Dr Marion McCutcheon is a Research Associate with Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong’s C3P Research Centre for Creative Critical Practice. A communications economist, she has worked within the Federal Government in telecommunications and broadcasting policy advisory and research roles. Her current research includes examining the role of the creative industries in economic systems in Australian creative hotspots, and evaluating the economic and social benefits derived from cultural and creative outputs – with a focus on crime drama series.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been enabled by an ARC Linkage Project grant [grant number LP160101724] entitled ‘Australian cultural and creative activity: A population and hotspot analysis’