MONEY FOR CREATIVES

We have pondered the question of what we, at the Funky Shirt Lunch Club, will define as the Creative Industries. This is important because on that definition hinges what we aim to arrange finance for.

Governments tend toward the widest possible description. Contrary to this, when creative industry players define what they do as creative, they conveniently forget the rest. So film people see their part of the creative industries in the pre-eminent position while theatre folk feel the same way about stage related projects and musicians feel much the same way about recording.

Investors want a clear path because they only have so much money to invest and quite frankly the financial cost per project within each industry is so different. Films generally cost a great deal more to produce than a painting, a sculpture, a poem or a book. They also have very different potential financial returns more or less commensurate with their costs.

The FSLC is based in the UK and therefore looks to use British talent, using the country's tax incentive schemes, and projects based from the UK. This doesn't exclude other possibilities but is the FSLC starting point.

The Funky Shirt Lunch Club decided to be as specific as possible to avoid disappointment to its investors and to be realistic to those pitching their projects. As a consequence we are currently looking at film and television production, plays, poetry, books, painting, sculpture and animation.

Presently we don't consider approaches from hairdressers, designers, personal shoppers, Maybe we will, in the future, reconsider and broaden the number and range of the creative projects we try to arrange finance for but for now we want to focus on four to six projects every six to eight weeks commencing in about one month.

We celebrate the fact that our colleagues have created an entirely separate Angels for Music division so we don't cover that area.

The first official pitches will soon be presented and we're excited to help great creative talents realise their dreams. If this inspires you to submit a project look at the guidelines we published here on January 5th. We look forward to updating you on the success of our projects soon.