On 12 November 2015, Screen Africa hosted a roundtable discussion for
practitioners in Johannesburg’s post-production sector, to discuss some of the
problems facing editors, colourists, final mixers and effects facilities in the country
and, by extension, the film and television industry as a whole.
The event was very well attended, with around 40 representatives of the sector
taking time out of their busy year-end schedules to attend.
Over the past year, Screen Africa staff, through their regular interactions with post-
production artists and technicians, had picked up on a number of common
challenges facing the sector. These could partially be reduced to two major
questions: firstly, the rising trend among major advertising agencies to bring post-
production work in-house; and secondly, a tendency, observed by many in the
post-production sector, for producers to allocate a disproportionately small
percentage of a project’s overall budget to post. During the discussion, these were
touched and expanded upon, with several other points added.
Some of the major points to emerge from the discussion are as follows:
- Post-production artists and technicians are price takers, ie. they are forced to
accept whatever prices are dictated by production budgets, rather than their
preferred asking rates. - There is a feeling that the work of post-production is undervalued in the industry
at large and post-production operatives have been inclined not to assert their value,
usually as a result of economic necessity – as work gets scarcer and competition
gets stiffer. - From the point of view of post-production people there is a lack of uniformity in
standards across the sector. At one end is the “lone operator with a laptop’ business
model and on the other is the large-scale post house offering the full value chain
from offline to final mix and grading. This results in a broad range of differentiating
factors in terms of operation costs, skills, expertise and quality. This differentiation
does not seem to translate to the demand side of the market, however, as is shown
by post-production’s “price taker’ status. To many producers the only differentiator
is price, meaning that, to use a car analogy, post-production services are expected
to deliver a Ferrari for the price of a Toyota. - There are concerns about the future and transformation of the industry. Hundreds
of graduates come out of training institutions every year. Where do they go? What
are they being taught? Are they equipped to fill the industry’s skills demands?
Some possible answers raised to these problems are as follows:
- The industry is changing and so there is no question of finding ways to restore and
maintain the old status quo. New workflows and new business models must be
devised. - Some post facilities have found partial solutions to reduced revenue by expanding
and diversifying their service offerings. - Quality differentiation needs to be re-asserted. As with any industry, there are
product tiers and you get what you pay for. If you are on a limited budget you can
get the best relative to what you are able to pay but you can’t expect the “premium
offering’. - Post-production and other parts of the industry should interact more closely with
the training sector. Training institutions need to know what the labour demands of
the industry are and cater to them. - The most pervasive opinion was that collective action is needed – the existence of
some sort of body that can facilitate collective bargaining and that actually has
teeth. This would require all members to know the value of their work and to assert
it, while still understanding the realities of budget limitations in the industry.
The problems raised are not easily solved and would require a great deal of further
discussion and collective effort but there was a general sense – expressed by many
attendees – that the gathering was a useful forum to express ideas, inspire
collaboration and come up with solutions.
Screen Africa will host a follow-up discussion in the first quarter of 2016 to focus on
possible solutions and open up the conversation to other disciplines within the
industry.
By Warren Holden
