Trinidadian cultural enterprises expert Dr Keith Nurse chairs the steering committee of the 3D Distribution Project, a start-up under the CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution umbrella announced in December. The project's name refers to digital, domestic and diaspora distribution. Nurse, who is based in Barbados, is a founding director of CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution. Lisa Allen-Agostini interviewed him via Skype last week on the 3D Distribution Project and Caribbean film.
Q: What exactly is the 3D Project and what are its goals?
A: As the title implies the 3D Distribution Project is designed to achieve a number of specific goals to take advantage of emerging opportunities.
First, digital platforms have become far more pervasive; they are now accessible to a large market base, and this relates to everything from Netflix to e-books and mobile telephony. We've been talking about these ideas for a number of years but they were not realisable until now. The new technologies have afforded a digital distribution framework.
Second, the Caribbean market is not restricted to the islands/region, but includes the Caribbean diaspora. The diaspora has significant spending power and interest in Caribbean-themed content, which is generally difficult to access.The third element is domestic and involves two components.
We need to get into Caribbean marketplaces, particularly in Web casts and other platforms. I think the Caribbean broadcast community is increasingly interested because they have seen the viability of local original content, but they don't have ready access to that content in a commercial framework. I think we are at a tipping point because we have seen some successes; it really comes down to marketing and business strategy.
There has also been a proliferation of regional film festivals, and increasing interest in and demand for Caribbean animation. You also see it in the fact that there is increasing production from filmmakers, whether in shorts or full-length features, or series, or documentaries. At the domestic/regional level I would say it is becoming increasingly feasible for Caribbean content to be accessible to Caribbean audiences.
The role of CaribbeanTales in this regard is to offer to the various stakeholders content in a commercialised framework. For example, a Caribbean airline is shopping through our catalogue right now for in-flight programming content. Before now they were not able to go to one provider to purchase this content. What we didn't have in place was this mechanism–we didn't have an effective marketplace.
That is the rationale for creating CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution in the first place.We (in the Caribbean region) have a large volume of music and film product but in global terms it's small. Only ten per cent of what is produced ends up being commercially viable. You have to create a platform that ensures that you achieve critical mass.
The ACP Cultures+ Programme of the European Union is one of the main sponsors of the project. How did they get involved and what's their stake in it?
We applied (for a grant) through the ACP Cultures fund. We were able to convince them we had the capacity to do distribution–and distribution is one of the key areas they had targeted in the selection criteria. From the Caribbean side we are the only company that had that capacity. We've been selling to broadcasters, universities, institutions and individuals. We already had a track record to prove we could do what we said we wanted to do.
We got seed money to set up (CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution) in Barbados–it wasn't available in Trinidad at the time. This is the importance of a regional approach. We are a diasporic firm tapping into a diasporic market. We have good links with players in Africa and the French-speaking Caribbean, who were also partners in our (ACP) application. It's grant funding.
It helps us to strengthen our operations. It's allowing us to strengthen our distribution systems and target wider markets. The 3D initiative allows us to use the digital platform to connect all our market spaces: CaribbeanTales TV, CaribbeanTales Flix, and CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution. They each have different mandates but they're interconnected. We also have the CaribbeanTales Incubator every September in Toronto, run alongside the Toronto International Film Festival. In the last incubator we focussed exclusively on producers making TV series.
We've seen through Netflix, for example, that there's a huge demand for TV in an online on-demand framework. The digital environment allows for multiple platforms for distribution; it makes these kinds of ventures viable. In the past we (the Caribbean region) were just too small. Film distribution was far more difficult, far more expensive than it is now. Thanks to technology we now have the means to achieve results.
What's your take on the current positioning of Caribbean film? Is it making headway or are we spinning top in mud?
Last night I went with my family to watch Paddington, the movie. Two things struck me.
The movie includes calypso songs by Aldwyn "Kitchener" Roberts, and sung by Tobago Crusoe. The film industry is a composite industry; it includes music and a whole range of skills. When you see how many people are employed to produce a film it's quite staggering. From costume making to makeup, lighting, sound engineering... the list goes on and on.
The second thing that struck me about the movie was that I wondered how much of the royalties are going to come back to the Caribbean from this movie. Is a Caribbean publishing company involved in the use of the copyright to the music? And it's not just a soundtrack–a band was performing in the movie. That's substantial. The film had earned $58 million (by December 29), and it cost $55 million to make. One can say there is a market and demand out there for Caribbean-themed content, whether it is in music, film, whatever, but the challenge is to ensure we capture some of the earnings from these industries.
My grandfather had the first Caribbean band in London after WWII and played on Kitchener's first Road March, Trouble in Arima. The same thing that applied 50-60 years ago applies today. Do the royalties come back to the Caribbean? When Anslem Douglas had Who Let the Dogs Out he was encouraged to drop Cott and go with an American agency.We've gone over that psychological hurdle that "we can do it too." If we still need cultural validation we are in real big trouble. We don't need anybody to tell us we have skills.
What we don't have is an organisational framework to convert our talent into a financial asset, an intellectual property asset that can be traded, that can employ people and can give us a share of the market. That is what is at issue now. We don't need a pat on the back.In the good old days success was defined by whether you were picked up by a major distribution company. But if you look at how Indian and Nigerian cinema have been successful, it's not about American distributors being interested.
There is a lot of market space outside the Hollywood framework that would make for a good return on investment. The difference between us and India and Nigeria is that they have scale factors we don't. But (in our regional and diaspora markets) we have crossover potential we haven't yet maximised on.The goal is to not only get stuff on mainstream outlets, it's to maximise on diaspora markets, regional markets. We are not even close, we're not even at ten per cent of that.
Where do you see Caribbean film in one, five and ten years down the road?
With the speed at which technology is moving it's really hard to predict. The market for a lot of shorts is going to grow quite rapidly; people are going to be accessing it on their mobile devices. The regionally telephony providers are going to become more important partners in this process. The Web TV phenomenon a la Netflix is going to create opportunities for serialised content, which is more profitable than one-off content. Serialised content creates a loyal customer base. It's on that basis you can then sell feature films.
I see animation expanding very rapidly, and an area where animation is going to grow rapidly is in non-entertainment applications–for example, animation for educational purposes has huge potential in the field of medicine and so on. Much of our focus in the sector in the Caribbean has been on entertainment but I think we should be strategic and target animation for education.
If you look at the expansion that the diasporic market is beginning to achieve–for example Tempo has greater access in the US Tri-State area, and SportsMax and Caribbean Entertainment Everyday Network (Ceen) have expanded their capacity in the Tri-State area and other parts of the US–if we can achieve the same kinds of market access in London, Toronto, Amsterdam, Paris, we would definitely be talking about an industry because we would have connected the production to a distribution and consumption platform.
And that's what inspires us at CaribbeanTales. We have the biggest catalogue of any company anywhere in the world in terms of Caribbean-themed content. That's our strategic advantage, which we are aiming to exploit and maximise on through our 3D initiative.