Film Industry Year in Review

Well, that was a year eh? If you had told me 12 months ago that (A)We would have a 37 year old woman as Prime Minister in New Zealand. And that (B) Avatar still wouldn’t be shooting by the end of 2017, I’d have asked you what you were on and could I have some?

Our beloved industry has seen more than it’s shares of ups and downs in 2017. We have seen the work flow peak and plummet with dismaying regularity. Perhaps wondered where the local productions have gone. And somehow made it here, still doing enough to call ourselves People Who Work in Film but maybe wondering just how much longer we can stay on the rollercoaster and is there any other industry we would fit into.

The end of 2017 brings us a review of the ‘Hobbit Law’, the promise of several big projects to get us through 2018 (which I write with some deja vu) and a heatwave which is making the urban types very happy but is breaking the hearts of farmers, wine makers and orchardists up and down the country. One season of drought or a month of heavy rain can wreck their entire year. Well, that’s the weather. It’s always going to let us down and we live with the fact that we can’t control it, only prepare for the worst.

But it seems to me that since we work in an industry controlled by people, not climate systems, we should be able to control our peaks and slumps a lot better than we do.

Surely with more co-ordination and communication between the studios and our own industry bodies, it should be possible to avoid the pile-up of 2016 and the relative drought of 2017 and instead plan for a couple of sustainable years. It’s not impossible. It just takes will, imagination and communication.

Anyway, that’s us for a year. Stay safe, treasure your friends and families, and we’ll see you – hopefully on set – in 2018.