Unity in Screen Industry

I have admiration for writers who sit at a computer and out pours a story. I love reading and I can easily lose myself in the writer’s world, experiencing the story in my mind. However, when I sit at the computer to write to you, I wonder what I will say. Maybe if I shot a video for this column, images rather than words, this process would be a lot easier.

I went to boarding school as did my brother and sister. From the age of 12 my Mother was the communicator. She wrote long and detailed letters for most of her life that kept us all connected and in spite of us being scattered around the world we knew what everyone was doing and how the village where we were from was changing. Her letters were such an important part of us being a family.

Similar to my family, the screen industry needs this path of communication. I am not going to sit and write letters to you all and tell you what everyone has been doing, but we do need to keep communicating.

The challenges we face aren’t as life-threatening as the issues with the health system or the stress of the farmers’ Mycoplasma Bovis disease that I listen to every morning on the radio. But our survival is dependent upon us being a family and meeting the challenges together and communicating with each other. We can’t live in isolation and still expect to be a coherent industry with a clear direction and control of our own destiny.

I am advocating for screen industry members to engage in the Guilds and Societies that are representing you. Joining would be the first thing. All screen industry members should be in either a Guild or Society, so they are engaged in the industry. Join the committees, take leadership roles and advocate for your fellow screen industry members to be active.

This industry will continue to face challenges in the future, and we need to have a communication system to discuss and debate our position and work as a collective screen group, a family, to present our point of view. Already we are finding challenges that are changing the way we approach our work. Challenges are good and bring positive outcomes when we think about the solution.

Health, Safety, Gender Equality, Cultural Diversity are all prominent subjects that we regularly hear discussed. They are subjects that we need to implement. Healthy working environments, the right to go to work and return safely to your family at the end of the day, respect for our fellow screen industry members, and showing respect for how we interact with each other in our work environment. Most of these changes are about attitude change and can only successfully come from the individual analysing and critiquing their behaviour and making the attitudinal change. This is not always easy because we have to step out of our comfort zone and re-evaluate the normal pattern of our working structure. But for anyone to move forward it is always important to step back and think about how we do things, how we approach issues and what we can learn from other people to better our work situation.

I see the speed with which changes are happening in the technology of the screen industry and the audience’s way of accessing and viewing the screen material. This impacts on how we continue to make a viable industry that supports the people who work in it. It has often been a rollercoaster ride. Sometimes the screen industry has been a Billion-dollar industry and then a Cottage industry. How do we iron out these fluctuations, so we don’t lose valuable people because they can no longer make a living? We have the skills to do this but it may require us to approach the problem from a different perspective.

I am presenting challenges but apart from communicating and respecting each other I have not provided solutions. I hope as an industry we can continue to come together and talk about our differences and provide solutions that work for us all and allow us to control and invigorate the screen industry.