site search

All SiteAbout UsResourcesNews and EventsCommunity ExhibitionAwardsServices

Swindon Film Society

To celebrate Swindon Film Society's victory at the Film Society of the Year Awards, they are currently our featured exhibitor. Below is their application for the Engholm Prize which shows many of the activities that they now undertake and the value they provide for their community.

Introduction

Our submission that we should be awarded the prize for Film Society of the Year is based on the way we have developed ourselves over the last five to six years. ‘Transformed’ is not too strong a word – we have grown from a moderately successful but rather inward looking one-venue / one-programme film society, into a dynamic local resource that delivers a range of excellent film programmes and services not only to our members but also to the wider community.
A few figures serve to summarise this transformation:

                                                     2004/5                   2010/11
Number of members                 263                        438
Number of screenings              15                          51
Total attendance                        1503                      4074
Number of venues used           One                        Twelve
Average audience reaction     78%                       83%
Total turnover                             £6,472                   £15,710

The turning-point was our success in 2004 in obtaining a grant from UK Film Council to purchase small-scale portable DVD equipment, so that we would be able to get out of our home base at Swindon Arts Centre, and develop programmes to reach wider and more diverse audiences. But that the grant in itself is not the full story – we also had to change our thinking about what the Film Society was here to do, we had to learn how to take risks and experiment, how to engage with partners and the media, how to be more confident and professional in our approach.
We are still learning… but, as evidenced by our successful 2010/11 season, we have made excellent progress.

Background and brief history

Swindon Film Society was formed in 1947, and its home base throughout that time has been the local-authority run Swindon Arts Centre. Over the years the society has experienced some ups and downs, but after some very troubled times in the mid 1990’s, it settled into a steady period. The 2004/5 season was fairly typical of the previous few years – a fifteen film programme of mainly foreign-language titles screened at the Arts Centre, attracting 250-300 members, about a quarter of whom were ‘full’ (i.e. signed up for the whole season) and the rest ‘general’ (i.e. pay-as-you-go). Average audiences hovered around 100 per film, and average reactions were in the range of 75-80%. Financially the Society was breaking even, but with a ‘hidden subsidy’ in the form of remittance of auditorium fees in return for SFS members acting as stewards at the Arts Centre own film programme – a lucrative source that would gradually dry up over the next couple of years as the Arts Centre decided not to show films.
The opportunity in 2004 to apply for a grant for DVD equipment for audience development projects was not fully endorsed by all our members, or indeed by all our committee – some thought it would be a distraction from our core activity and a drain on our resources. However at the time we had severe concerns about the Arts Centre’s aging 35mm equipment, and it was agreed at our 2004 AGM that investment of £800 of our
reserves (our 20% contribution to the total equipment cost) was justified, as this would provide us with a back-up solution – we were clear in our grant application about this dual purpose for the equipment. (Since then, in 2008, the Arts Centre installed its own DVD equipment. We contributed one-third of the cost. The 35mm projector is still on site, but hasn’t be used for a couple of years) The very first time we used our new DVD equipment publicity was at a screening of Peace One Day in September 2005 – inspired by the previous BFFS National Viewing Day. We worked in partnership with local Amnesty, Oxfam and church groups to promote the screening, and this type of partnership working has been a feature of our outreach work since then.
Our first major ‘outreach’ project, early in 2006, was to run a short season of films in Highworth, a small town a few miles north of Swindon, where a number of SFS members lived. They helped us get the project underway, and most of them are still involved in our regular monthly programme in the town. Since then we have continued to develop our outreach programme in a variety of different projects, some on our own initiative, some in partnership, some very successful, others less so …. but always gaining experience and extending our reach. At the 2007 AGM members agreed that we could use up to 10% of our reserves in any financial year to support the alternative programmes – a facility we have never needed to draw on. The next leap forward came towards the end of 2009, when we were asked by Swindon Cultural Partnership (a business-backed development consortium) to try to revive Swindon Film Festival. This proved to be a much bigger undertaking than we anticipated, but we are pleased to say that we have survived two successful festivals now, with very positive audience feedback and media coverage, and are starting to plan the 2012 event.

Far from draining our core activity, business at the Arts Centre is booming. Our average audience for our main programme in 2010/11 was 135, higher than anyone can remember before, and total membership of 438 in the year is also a record. Nevertheless, in 2010/11 season, over half our 4000+ audience and two-thirds of our 50+ screenings came from the community-based projects, rather than our core programme. And, because of an unanticipated hike in Arts Centre charges half way through the season, the “profit” we made in 2010/11 all came from the community/outreach projects – whereas the core programme made a bit of a loss. 

Film programming

Developing our ‘outreach’ projects, and running the Swindon Film Festival, has enabled us to programme a much wider range of films that we could when we only used Swindon Arts Centre – from ‘art-house’, documentaries and classics to mainstream box office successes in some of our village screenings. There are 16 cinema screens in two multiplexes in Swindon. They show almost exclusively mainstream Hollywood films, and only very rarely foreign-language or independent titles. This has allowed us to fill a ‘niche’ in the market with our main Arts Centre programme – which is almost exclusively foreign-language/ independent. However the Arts Centre auditorium is a 200-seat venue, and is expensive to hire, so although we always include some more “challenging” films in the programme, we cannot afford to take too many risks that might lead to a long-term drop in audience numbers. Consequently we are now using a number of smaller venues (Swindon Central Library, the Dance Theatre, a local pub with a small live music hall ….) both in and outside the Festival to show films that we know have a smaller audience appeal. In both our Arts Centre and Highworth programmes we aim for a good balance of country, genre, theme, and our reputation for good programming is such that we can include a few films that hardly anybody has heard of as well as some of the top international prize winners. The former often get a higher audience rating!
The Highworth audience belies the notion that you can’t programme foreign language films in small towns and villages. We have always aimed for about 50/50 English to foreign language there, and analysis shows there is little difference in the attendance level, and the foreign language ones have a slightly better audience rating overall.
There is a full list of the films we have screened during 2010/11 at the end of this submission, and brochures and flyers for some of the programmes are included at Appendices 2, 3 and 4. Some examples of our programme notes are included at Appendix 5, and can also be found on our websites www.swindonfilm.org.uk and www.swindonfilmfestival.org

Membership and Audience Engagement

Because of our outreach projects we have relaxed to some extent insistence on SFS membership, and offer open guest admission to all screenings apart from our Arts Centre programme. But by deliberately keeping our general membership price very low (£2 per season) and offering a lower member’s admission at all our screenings, it is easy to encourage people to join the Society. However, with such a large and diverse membership, it can be difficult to engender a sense of ‘belonging’. Things like programme notes and reaction slips do create a sense that we are different from an ordinary cinema – and are often commented on when people come to our films for the first time. In the past few years we have been asking members for e-mail addresses, and we now keep in regular touch with about 90% of them via a monthly e-mailing – a reminder of the films coming up, feedback on audience reactions etc, and, whenever possible, a bit of member consultation.

Surprisingly, given the amount of spam we all receive, this seems to work: -

• A bit of musing about whether we should change our reaction slips resulted in 46 thoughtful responses – some of them surprisingly passionate!
• When we broke the news about an unexpected hike in Arts Centre charges and its likely adverse effect on our prices in 2011/12 and beyond we got a lot of very positive and supportive feedback from members
• When we e-mailed the invitation to apply for our new ‘Introduction to Film Studies’course, we were fully booked in three days.
   

More generally, we have noticed that the tail-off in audience numbers that we use to experience in the latter half of the season has been much lower in the last couple of years. So this simple and cheap method seems to be effective. In this last season we’ve also started a Facebook page, which now has 180 friends’ – but this isn’t proving at all interactive as we had hoped – something we need to work on. In the last few years we have been asking new members how they heard about us, and overwhelmingly the response is “from a friend or colleague”. We have yet to devise a good marketing strategy around that premise! - but we do make members aware of that, and ask them to pass on e-mails, put posters up at work, whatever – which they respond to. We try to foster a sense of that the Society is something that belongs to us all, and that we are all responsible for. Swindon has quite a large transient population of young professional people, and, although over 100 members have been with us for 5 years or more, the membership turnover averages about 35% a year. We don’t know if this is high – we have nothing to compare it with! But it means we have to work hard to keep up our profile. The ‘outreach’ programme and Film Festival have made that easier – both because in themselves they generate publicity, and because the local media is more interested in what we are doing – it’s easier now to get an article in the local press, or an interview on the radio.
During the Film Festival in March we carried out some audience profile sampling via a questionnaire, and the results of that showed that around that 36% of attendees were not Swindon Film Society members, and 40% were not regular cinema goers. Clearly we got into some new territory with that programme, and it will be interesting to see what impact that might have when our new season starts this September.

Community Activity

The heart of our strategy over the last few years has been to develop a more outwardlooking and inclusive profile for Swindon Film Society – and thereby raise audience numbers and access to film - through engagement with a wider community than we could expect if we passively expected people to come to us at the Arts Centre. One possible payback – which appears to be bearing fruit – is that by actively going out into the community, then people might start to see us as being more accessible, and more of them would start to come to us. It’s probably true to say that that was a key motivator for us when we embarked on this journey, but now we enjoy showing films in other places so much that it’s less of a consideration! However…We can identify three main strands of community activity:

A. Taking films out to people in nearby towns and villages
Our Highworth programme has already been mentioned, and is well established. It’s very much a local member led project, financially viable, and we hope they will agree to become an independent film society in this coming season. In recent months we have been workingwith members and residents in Cricklade, with the idea of developing a similar programme there – it a fairly big and very active community that could sustain a
regular film programme. We have also worked with village hall committees etc in a number of other parishes – most regularly Wroughton, but also Wanborough, Purton, Wootton Bassett from time to time. This is usually on a partnership basis, where the hall helps promote the film and retains any profits from the box office after we have covered our costs. We are currently working with a new partner – Broad Hinton community hall – for a trial screening in October. Screening films in small communities is a very different experience from our main Arts Centre venue – usually a lot more fun! The events appeal particularly to older people and we think it’s fine to target the films we show in the villages towards that group – they either can’t get to, or don’t like, the big town multiplexes, and it’s good to give them the opportunity to see films they would otherwise miss. We make no apologies for showing The King’s Speech three times! 

B. Working with partners
We have developed good working relationships with a number of local organisations to show films either as special partnership events, or as part of their programme – sometimes at their request, other suggested by us. In the last couple of years, these have included:

• Swindon Literature Festival – Bright Star, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Economics of Happiness
• Swindon Climate Action Network – Age Of Stupid, Food Inc, The Yes Men Fix the World
• Amnesty – Burma VJ, In Prison my Whole Life
• Anglo-French Society – The Chorus, Pere Noel
• Christian Aid - Black Gold
• Swindon Cultural Partnership – We Are Together

We are currently working with the inSwindon town centre development group to show two open-air family films this week, with Swindon Libraries to show two 1950s/60s films as part of a reminiscences event they are running in September, and with the Black History Group to show Fire in Babylon as part of their Black History Month programme. 

C. Swindon Film Festival
Late in 2009 we were asked by the Swindon Cultural Partnership if we would try to revive Swindon Film Festival, which faltered a few years ago when the person who used to run it moved away. From the outset our concept was that we should organise the festival as an out-going, inclusive and accessible event, using lots of different venues, working with lots of different partners, with very broadly-based programming to appeal to many different sections of the community. With two festivals now behind us, we feel that we are on track with that. For example, in this year’s festival:

• We showed films for the first time in North Swindon library, which is situated in a new housing development with few local community facilities
• We worked for the first time with the Swindon Museum of Computing to present a double bill programme of Tron and Metropolis
• We included a ‘local film makers showcase’ which proved very popular, got a lot of media attention, and also a local sponsor who wants to support us to develop this as a regular event.
• We received some grant support from South West Screen for our 2011 festival, and they were impressed with the outcomes. Let’s hope the successor agency feels the same! 

A Film Festival is a very different animal to from our other activities! It needs a lot of juggling, quick thinking, quick decisions – not something best dealt with by committees or open consultation, which is the usual way that we work. For now our chair is taking the lead role, but we need to develop a model which is sustainable and not dependent on one individual – always an issue when key roles are undertaken by volunteers.