Fair Creative Economies
Animated Shorts Commission Brief
The Fair Creative Economies (FaCE) project is looking to commission a creative or team with experience of animation and storytelling to produce two 3-minute animated films.
Fair Creative Economies Project
FaCE is a research project that explores how we organise work in the creative industries. We want to identify what obstacles exist to developing new ways of creating robust, low-carbon, high inclusion, high democracy alternatives to existing business practices within the sector and find ways to address those obstacles.
The project is led by Dr Simon Moreton and Dr Liz Roberts at UWE Bristol and Prof Martin Parker and Dr Claudia Firth at the University of Bristol, with our PhD students, Will Hunter and Alice Quigley. It is part of a much bigger project called MyWorld and is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
FaCE Workshops
Over the last 18 months, FaCE have been running workshops with creative professionals, primarily working in the arts and culture sectors.
The workshops helped participants reflect on their creative careers holistically, explore the values that underpin their work and organisational practices and mapped their knowledge of alternative funding, financial support, business development, and organisational models
The activities culminated in a Creative Futures Workshop in which our participants identified their biggest frustrations with how the creative sector operates and imagined a parallel universe where these frustrations were reversed. They used a ‘futures card deck’ to explore how these different futures might emerge, and created storyboards and multimedia performances to demonstrate a creative future they would like to see.
The Animated Films:
FaCE requires a creative or creatives to produce two short, animated films approximately 3 minutes in length. Each will bring together some of the source materials collected in the Creative Futures workshop to tell a story about a possible future for creative work. The source materials include storyboards, sketches and flipchart paper scribbles, audio-recordings, video-recordings and short anonymised transcripts of group discussions collected by the FaCE Team.
We have short-listed a set of core motifs and suggested narratives for the films. The person(s) commissioned to produce the films will work closely with the FaCE team to hone these narratives, and bring new ideas and fresh perspectives to the process.
This opportunity might suit one person or a team.
The end goal
We would like the films to:
– function as assets for the project to promote the work that has been done and to broaden our scope to engage with wider audiences through sharing them on social media and other public forums. They will help us share our research findings using non-academic, jargon-free stories.
– expand how we imagine alternatives to our current systems, following the principle that we need new vocabulary, visuals and stories to create the conditions for better futures to become
possible: ‘you have to be able to see it to become it’. We would like these films to inspire the imagination.
Intended Audiences
The films are intended primarily for those working in creative sectors, policy, funding and other infrastructural spaces that influence and set parameters for the direction of the creative sector. We also foresee a secondary public audience, particularly those interested in environmentally sustainable, inclusive futures and new forms of democracy.
Criteria for applying:
– Evidence of experience scripting short films or stories AND/OR
– Evidence of experience creating animated films
– Comfortable working closely with academics
– Comfortable working with eclectic and imperfect materials to develop ‘composite’ stories
– Comfortable sharing intellectual property/the film credits with the workshop participants who originated these ideas – they will be your co-authors
– Able to work to deadline and to budget
– Able to begin commission in November 2024 – An interest in low-carbon, high-democracy, high-inclusion futures and the systems to create this
– Be registered as self-employed
Process:
Please send an introductory email to liz3.roberts@uwe.ac.uk by the Friday 11th October 2024 with an expression of interest, including hyperlinks to relevant past work/portfolio. We will then invite you to a Zoom call to discuss ideas, feasibility, budget and timeline, following which you will provide a written quote. We intend the commission to commence in November, starting with development meetings with the team. The completed films will need to be delivered by end of February 2025 in appropriate formats for web/socials/screen. Payment will be split to include an upfront payment and final payment on receipt of films.