Revised guidelines for Screen Australia Enterprise Program released for comment

Friday 18 December 2009

Screen Australia today released a revised draft of the guidelines for its Enterprise Program for comment by industry practitioners.

“The Enterprise program is central to our vision for a more commercially sustainable screen production industry,” said Screen Australia Chief Executive Ruth Harley. “Based on industry feedback and our experience of the inaugural round in 2009, we’ve reworked the guidelines with the aim of better meeting industry needs as well as streamlining our processes.”

A total of $3 million will be available over a three-year period for the 2010 round, with a maximum of $350,000 per year proposed for each successful applicant company.

“No company was awarded more than $350,000 per year in the 2009 round so it seemed appropriate to reduce the cap from $500,000,” said Dr Harley. “The lower cap also allows us to spread our allocation further to support a diverse range of companies.”

Other changes to the guidelines include:

• clarifying the program’s aims and eligibility criteria;
• eliminating the Expression of Interest (EOI) stage, with all applicants submitting a full business plan as part of their application;
• permitting successful applicants to apply separately for feature development funding under certain circumstances.

“Eliminating the EOI stage will reduce the cost and time burden of a two-stage process for both the applicant and Screen Australia,” Dr Harley said.

Screen Australia will hold a series of national industry briefings early in 2010 to share some of the insights gained from the 2009 assessment process. The sessions will focus particularly on the methods applicants could use to more fully research their business plans and strategies.

“We are also proposing, under certain circumstances, to allow Enterprise recipients to apply for single-project feature development funding,” said Dr Harley. “Feature development requires a very particular skill set and we only want Enterprise funding to be used for features if the company can demonstrate strong capability in this area. However, we don’t necessarily want to dissuade Enterprise funding recipients from pursuing feature ambitions, given that finding and developing extraordinary feature projects is a very high priority for us.

“So, in situations where feature development is not part of a company’s Enterprise funding, under the proposed new guidelines the company might still be eligible to apply to our single-project feature development program. The application would be subject to the normal assessment process for that program, of course, and there would also be limits on what the funds could be used for, to ensure there was no duplication of Enterprise funds.”

The revised Enterprise Program guidelines, along with further details of the proposed changes, are available at www.screenaustralia.gov.au/enterprise2010. Comments can be made until Friday 29 January 2010.

Victoria Buchan, The Lantern Group, victoria@lanterngroup.com.au
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