Sources of funding

Sources of funding

Public and Private Funding

There are different methods of film finance these methods are Public, Private and Joint funding. Public film funding is when you go to film councils such as the BFI and get backing from them to make your film, this is easier than private funding because there is a higher chance of get backing from a public fund than a private fund. Private film funding is when the investment fund that funds your project has less than 100 investors or its member investors have substantial funds invested elsewhere. An example of this is Ingenious Media. Private film funding has positives and negatives when compared to public film funding. A reason to pick private funding over public funding is that you will receive a larger budget. This means you can be more free with locations and equipment you hire. Another positive of getting privately funded is the organisation will want to get involved so there are more creative minds on one project. However, this is also a negative because they want to get involved to see what there money is being spent on so they might not agree on a idea and refuse to give you any more funds if you continue with the idea. These restrictions will cause the director problems and they will have less control over their own project. There are less restrictions with public funding, you have more creative freedom. A negative of picking private funding is that it is much harder to successfully get a project funded than a getting a project funded using public funding. To get a project successfully private funded you will most likely have to be known in the industry and worked on successful projects before. 

Joint Funding

Joint funding is when a project has funding from multiple organisations which are both private and public who have interest in funding your projects e.g short film. When a project has joint funding it has the advantages of both public and private funding which include a bigger budget due to multiple backing organisations giving your project funds. Another advantage is that there is a large amount of creative individuals who are interested in your project, if backers didn't find your project interesting they wouldn't fund it. This means that there are more ideas which could really help your project. However, Joint funding also has disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage of joint funding is that there are more people to restrict what you do with your project, depending on the organisation they might give you a lot of freedom or they might like getting really involved and if they don't like a certain idea they might tell you not to do it by threatening to back out. The organisation threatening to back out would cause problems because without the organisations that are funding your film project you will have no budget and the project will have to be cancelled.