Making great feature movies and animated films are not easy. It needs outstanding creativity, appropriate technology and processes—and a passion for moving images. The UK film industry has produced its fair share of feature films in recent years, but its main strength is in the depth of its production sector and skill base. The industry has world-renowned facilities (film studios) with state-of-the-art equipment such as Pinewood Studios which remains one of the world’s leading destinations for the makers of film, television and commercials. Supporting this is a large service sector, well established in key clusters (in London and the South East, especially Soho in central London, but also in urban centres around the country), with world-class people working in all areas of production to provide all the ancillary and specialist services necessary for the production of top-quality films and animations. Leading-edge innovations from the sector, as well as Government support in the form of tax breaks for filmmakers to come to our shores, has helped to make the sector more vibrant. However, R&D tax relief and the Creative Industry Tax Reliefs would provide the direct support that companies in the sector need to continue to innovate and push the boundaries of technology in the field, keeping the UK one of the most attractive and competitive places in the world for production work.
Examples of eligible R&D activities:
- Developing equipment for on-set production to aid the crew in capturing the raw footage;
- Developing post-production equipment for film scanning, colour grading and colour management;
- Writing software algorithms to create more complex visual effects and animations;
- Developing tools and application to optimise the post-production pipeline including the rendering and compositing activities;
- Creating image processing applications and workflow tools to transform film and video post-production.