This week we attended the conference “Sitges and the New Audiovisual Panorama”, our president Albert Soler was the moderator of the debate on the new audiovisual paradigm.
The day opened with the presentation of the new Sitges Film Office brand and the challenges it faces, by the Councillor for Economic Promotion, Guillem Escolà.
The councillor explained the commitment to consolidate Sitges as a driving force in the audiovisual production industry. Guillem Escolà also announced the new agreements and productions that will take place in Sitges.
Jaume Roures gave a talk on “The new audiovisual panorama after the arrival of the platforms”.
The Department of Economic Promotion of the City of Sitges presented the new challenges of the renewed Sitges Film Office, to coordinate, manage and facilitate the needs of audiovisual production (feature films, TV series, advertising, video clips, documentaries and photo shoots that want to take place in Sitges) and adapted to the new reality with the emergence of large platforms.
The Sitges Film Office has brought together professionals in the sector with the aim of creating synergies to strengthen the positioning of the sites in this audiovisual sector.
To promote the Sitges brand in the audiovisual production industry, the Sitges Film Office has the support of the Node Film Cluster and the Gran Penedès Film Commission and the streamlining of new procedures to carry out the paperwork and obtain filming permits. It also works in collaboration with the Spain Film Commission and promotes training courses such as Producers Meet Producers (PMP) to promote new producers as part of the Sitges-International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, a conference on location scouting as part of the Sitges Next Festival and the first edition of Script Lab, a conference to train screenwriters as part of the second LGTBIQ+ Endimaris Film Festival.
Jaume Roures and the new audiovisual panorama after the arrival of platforms
The producer and founding partner of Mediapro, Jaume Roures, explained during his talk “The new audiovisual panorama after the arrival of platforms” that “we must define strategic plans that have a global vision in order to move forward and make qualitative leaps beyond having sets. We must take advantage of the situation to achieve our objective as a country to create an industry, as France has done, which has built a cultural strategy, a cultural section to develop an audiovisual industry”.
Jaume Roures assures that the emergence of digital platforms has led to an increase in the number of investments in production and, therefore, the challenge is to participate in this process because we have the capacity and the talent. The producer and founding partner of Mediapro also pointed out that “the Next Generation funds are important. The 3 Chimneys Hub is currently being promoted, which is not just a film set but should be a reference centre for training, research, virtual reality, video game development and the future metaverse”. It is necessary to build an industry adapted to the 21st century, to ICTs. In this context, Jaume Roures also remarked that “it is necessary for audiovisual education to be present in school curricula” and also stressed that we must defend public television, TV3, as an important tool for language, culture and integration, and we must also support film festivals”.
The session ended with a debate on the new audiovisual paradigm moderated by Albert Soler, president of the Association of Advertising Film Producers.
