FOCAL International: Annual Report, 2021

focalint.org

A N N U A L R E P O R T

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Overview of the Year: 2021 was another unpredictable year; we would like to thank you all for your support.

We made leaps and bounds in what we want to offer and achieved.

We created new aspects to include our very successful online workshops, a YouTube channel and FOCALPoint our biannual magazine, to name a few.

We sought out additional member benefits including access to all recordings of FOCAL’s online workshops as well as highlighing our members in the new individual and company of the month scheme.

With the pandemic slowing down we will reintroduce our physical events to carry this momentum into 2022 and are delighted once again host the Awards in person.

Virtual Murder Mystery Night, November 18th 2021

Table of Content: Monthly Highlights

Pg. 4, 5

Day to Day

Pg. 6

Mailers

Pg. 7

Social Media

Pg. 8, 9

2021 Online Workshops

Pg. 10, 11

Website Improvements

Pg. 12, 13

FOCAL Awards 2021

Pg. 14, 15

Executive Board and Contact Information

Pg. 16

M O N T H L Y

H

Launched FOCAL Online Workshop – 1

Camille & Adrienne joined FOCAL

FOCAL Awards Submission Closed

#PreserveAfricaArchive Project – Member of Board

Workshop – 2

FOCAL Virtual Quiz Night Workshop – 3 UKFD Screen Heritage Working Group – participation

Launched FOCAL Head to Head interview series Workshop – 6 AI/Copyright – IPO Meeting attended

Awards Researcher Working Group meeting launched

FOCAL in-person summer drinks in London German Researchers Group Meeting

I G H L I G H T S :

Announced FOCAL Award Virtual Host – Jo Caulfield

FOCAL Awards Shortlisted Nominations Announced

Workshop – 4

Workshop – 5

New advance functionality launched on FOCAL website

Sunny Side of the Docs – Jury Participation National Film & Television School – FOCAL Awards webinars

FOCAL Awards 2021 Programme – Winners Announced New FOCAL Executives Council Members announced Morley College Student Lecture ‘Audio-visual Industry’ - FOCAL Participation Sheffield Doc Fest 2021 – virtually attended

Published 1st FOCAL bi-annual magazine FOCALPoint Opened submissions for FOCAL Awards 2022 Workshop – 7 BFF LFF 2021 – attended

FOCAL Member of the Month launched Workshop – 8 Virtual Murder Mystery night

Call for mentors for 1st FOCAL mentoring programme FOCAL in-person Christmas drinks in London Workshop – 9 FOCUS Event – attended

D A Y

T O

D A Y :

The following are examples of our daily activity within the FOCAL office

Footage and Content 387 Leads Recieved

Skills and Services 97 Leads Recieved

Within the Footage and Content Finders we had on average 32 requests sent to our members a month. March and October were the highest months receiving 45 and 41 requests. As expected November and December were quieter months.

Looking at the Skills and Services Requests, we built up a steady number of requests leading up to the summer months before quieting off for November and December. The highest requests were in July and October, receiving 18 and 13 respectively. On average we received 8 Skills and Services Requests a month.

FOCAL Members 288 across 5 categories

Our members are split into 5 categories, as per the graph, showing a total of 96 company members, 160 individual and 11 associate members We are actively seeking to enhance our membership benefits. This includes an increase in promotion across all FOCAL social media channels as well as keeping up to date and responding to members’ posts. We launched the Researchers Working Group to ensure we focus on individual researcher members concerns and benefits plus are re-instigating the Library Managers meetings to provide an opportunity for the footage archives/ libraries to discuss any ongoing issues, share information and look to see how FOCAL can support the industry and members in the coming years.

C A M P A I G N 8th: Workshop

M A I L E R S :

3rd: Workshop

2nd: Virtual Quiz

6th: Workshop

17th: Awards Extension

4th: Newsletter

13th: Newsletter

24th: Awards 2021

14th: Workshop Reminder

23rd: Workshop

7th: Awards Shortlisted Nominees 14th: FOCAL Board Nominations

1st: Awards Further Shortlisted Nominees 15th: Awards Info 18th: Awards Teaser

27th: Awards Host

22nd: Newsletter

29th: Careers

23rd: Awards Teaser 24th: Awards Teaser 25th: Award Winners

Jan

Dec

6th: Mentors Callout

Feb

Nov

Oct

Apr

Sept

8th: Workshop

1st: Newsletter

9th: Online Workshop

13th: Awards 2022 Res and Pres Open

7th: Summer Refresher Social

12th: Newsletter

14th: Newsletter

17th: New Membership Benefit

15th: Murder Mystery Reminder

18th: Workshop Reminder

27th: Awards 2022 Submissions Open

20th: Newsletter

18th: FOCAL Drinks Invite

26th: Workshop

31st: Top Moments of 2021

23rd: Online Workshop

8th: Online Workshop 13th: Awards 2022 Venue

4th: Murder Mystery Invite

Mar

29th: Awards Reminder

May

Aug

9th: Newsletter

June

July

7th: Online Workshop 16th:: Online Workshop 22nd: Online Workshop

S O C I A L Increasing our social media presence was a key target for 2021.

We focused on 5 different platforms: • Facebook - /focalinternational • Instagram - @focal_international • Twitter - @FOCALInt • LinkedIn - /company/FOCAL • YouTube - bit.ly/FOCALYouTube

Facebook The graph beside shows a steady increase in our Facebook posts and engagement rate throughout the year.

Our posts on Facebook have consisted of Member’s News plus Industry and FOCAL News. Compared to 2020 our engagement rates and followers have significantly increased.

It’s important to note in June we streamed the FOCAL Awards on Facebook. Similarly in May we announced the Shortlisted Nominees for the FOCAL Awards.

Instagram Posts The nature of our Instagram posts are shareable infographics that contain important and relevant information.

Head to Head We released over two and a half hours of educational material from 30 interviews with FOCAL Award Winners and Nominees on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

This generated over 17, 683 views.

M E D I A Twitter We have actively posted on Twitter over the year to increase activity and followers as shown in the graph. Similarly impressions have increased compared to 2020.

Impressions include clicks onto our page, link clicks, likes, retweets and the number of people who saw the tweet.

LinkedIn We do not want to oversaturate LinkedIn. We choose to post less to ensure it is only relevant information e.g. Workshops, Key Awards Dates and Important Announcements.

It is worth noting we did not post in August as we were actively running numerous social media campaigns on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram Reels.

Social Media Post Examples:

January 2021: How to Organise Material during Covid-19 With an invited panel from across the audio-visual market we gain additional information on the best way to organise your material as well as new approaches of working in the ongoing pandemic. Our panel of speakers covered areas such as supplying/delivering viewing and technical material, dealing with transfers, budgets and what timescales should be taken into consideration when seeking content.

February 2021: Licensing Content from National & Regional UK Archives FOCAL International offered this exclusive online workshop which gave us an opportunity discovery the wealth of content available from across Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Representatives from five film archives were on hand to showcase highlights and share details of their extensive collections, how you search material, what rights are available and their process for end-to-end delivery of content.

March 2021: Clearing Third Party Rights in Archives Another chance to hear from the industry experts who took us through the successes and the pitfalls of clearing third party rights across stills and footage content.

April 2021: Technology: Future Applications & Platforms Can you keep up with the ever-changing technological environment?

During this workshop we provided an opportunity of how we use everyday knowledge and experiences to discuss options to enhance and streamline everyday business.

Industry experts took us through how best to work with AI from a user and rights holder point of view, how to introduce new services such as parallel transcoding for faster-thanreal-time performance and finally how to acknowledge key trends and future interaction technology.

May 2021: Pathway to Becoming a Media Archivist (Hear from the Professionals) This workshop looked at employment in moving image archives. What training opportunities are there for the archivist and researcher, both corporate and freelance?

What kind of roles exist within our industry? And how does a new entrant, or even an old hand, progress and thrive in our field. The panel offered insights though their experience and knowledge of the career opportunities, in what is….after all…an expanding sector.

July 2021: Searching for Authenticity (Where to go when looking for Original Content) - Joint workshop with BAPLA With the proliferation of shared content, it’s hard to know if what you have found or sourced on social media is posted by the creator or rightsholder. The best places to look for and source authentic original content are stills & audio-visual archives.

Questions covered include: • Are there different approaches for still and moving images?

• Who should buyers approach to obtain clearances?

• Can you assume editorial use doesn’t need the same level of scrutiny?

• What about NFTs, do these need to be cleared and by who?

2021 ONLINE WORKSHOPS: October 2021: Rights Clearances for Music Content An introduction to music clearance and the right steps of how to search and secure rights. This session answered questions such as: • How do you find the right material?

• Is there a different approach to acquiring music content?

• What 3rd party rights need to be licensed and approx., timelines?

• How to you deal with public domain or royalty free content?

• What are the pitfalls to look out for?

November 2021: Film Restoration & Preservation A whistle stop tour of film restoration and preservation from vault management, with physical examples of way to store your films, to scanning and grading. Topics included answers to the questions: • Do you know what a DPX File is?

• How do you identify Nitrate?

• How to undertake film cleaning?

December 2021: Licensing Content from National & Regional Archives, UK and Ireland A further opportunity to hear from the representatives and discover the wealth of content available from Imperial War Museums (IWM), North West Film Archive and IFI Film Archive. The panellist shared highlights from their collections, gave explanations on how to find and search material, what rights are available, and the process for end-toend delivery of content.

As we can see in the graph on the left the Workshop in March, May and November proved to be the most popular, bringing in 132, 192 and 121 attendees.

It’s worth noting we did not hold a workshop in June as this conflicted with the virtual FOCAL Awards.

Numbers for July look low, this is due to co-hosting the workshop with BAPLA who registered half the attendees not expressed on the graph.

W E B S I T E

I M P

In 2020 we made the decision to completely remake FOCAL’s Website. Throughout this development we have key factors in mind: • Streamline the experience for users • Highlight our Members • Have all of FOCAL in one area Since the revamp we have continued to improve the website and in 2021 we: • Brought over the Awards Section to host at focalint.org • Updated the Members Area • Enhanced the Member’s Directory • Showcase Member’s Video on Homepage If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by emailing info@focalint.org

Improving the Awards Section at focalint.org/awards This was the biggest task of 2021 and contained multiple components in the improvements.

Custom image to the Awards Homepage

Visual enhancements to the Awards landing page

Added an additional breadcomb so you can return to the Awards Year

Improved management of nominees so we can now add numerous titles for those who worked on the production Brought over all previous winner’s information

focalin

P R O V E M E N T S Additional Features within the Members Area •

Uploaded all FOCAL Online Workshops from 2021.

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Members can now upload their own articles to be directly featured on FOCAL’s News Items.

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Created a new page filled with important information for Company and Individual Members. This includes:

Improving the Member’s Directory: The new Advanced Search Function was perhaps one of the biggest improvement from 2021. This now allows users to specify what it is they are looking for. Perhaps a company from the United States, or an Archive Producer specifying in Music users can be as specific or vague as they wish.

Further to our Advanced Search, users can now filter Members by Type.

nt.org We have improved our member search where we can include keywords and common misspelts

F O C A L AWA R D S 2 0 2 1 Due to the ongoing pandemic we held the 2nd virtual Awards June 2021, streamed across 3 platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook) to cater to all of our virtual attendees.

The 2021 competition received a wide variety of submissions making it an undeniably rich and diverse contest, made possible by the incredible work of archive professionals, restorations, and researchers.

We honoured 55 nominees across 14 award categories, the highest number of shortlisted nominees since the Awards were established in 2004.

Nominations Nominations Nominations Nominations Nominations Nominations Nominations

Looking specifically at the Production Categories, History Production, Factual and Natural World and Cinematic had the highest number of submissions.

Awards Show Awards Show Awards Show Awards Show Awards Show Awards Show Awards Show Awards Show Awards Show Awards Show

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We release a digital Awards Programme on Issuu, including information on all nominees. We received 950 impressions, read by 404 people with 33 clicked throughs. The top three countries were UK, USA and France.

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Views for the Awards: YouTube = 567, Facebook = 502, Vimeo = 77 Total views = 1,146

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Created hype for the Awards by prereleasing sizzle reels on Youtube.

Teaser 1 = 86 views, Teaser 2 = 104 views

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Although Covid had an impact on the Awards Gala night, producing and streaming a virtual awards show enabled people to tune in and watch no matter what country they were based in.

Advertising Advertising Advertising Advertising Advertising Advertising Advertising

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We conducted multiple social media campaigns to highlight the award categories and the nominations.

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Launched the press released for the nominations through a mailer, social media posts and a dedicated news section on our website.

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Released an Awards Booklet - contained information about the nominations and winners.

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Launched FOCALPoint off the back of the awards.

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Interviewed the nominees and winners (Head to Head) - posted on social media and our YouTube channel

EXECUTIVE BOARD In May 2021 we were delighted to welcome 3 new executives to the board.

• James MacMillan (Business Development Manager, ITV Content Services) • Vicky Turner (Director of Sales, EMEA/APAC, Nimia) • Kate Griffiths (Archive Producer, Clearance Matters) The Executive Council shape the association and support our community of members.

C O N T A C T

Mary Egan Director of Operations mary@focalint.org

Camille Carlier Awards and Membership Coordinator camille@focalint.org

U S :

Adrienne Kuster Social Media and Marketing Coordinator adrienne@focalint.org

All photos are credited to MBE Media, FOCAL International and Adrienne Kuster

HERES TO 2022...