See below for details of the three posts with The 8½ Foundation: Project Manager, Industry Producer and Administrative Assistant
The 8½ Foundation, a new Scottish Charity, will be part think tank — using the media to explain the idea — and part delivery mechanism. On our website Scottish kids will see clips from some great films. Then 8½ year olds in ten key hubs around Scotland can choose which of the films they would like to receive, on DVD, as a present, for their movie birthday.
The ten hubs are five schools across Scotland, a children's hospital, the network of Regional Film Theatres, and a Chinese, an Indian and a Polish community group.
Contract: 2 months per year for 2 years, @£2.5K per month, schedule D. The most intensive period of work will be during the first six months.
Location: The project's bases are Edinburgh and Nairn in Scotland but you could, in theory, work anywhere.
Start date: negotiable, but no later than 30 April 2010.
Answering to Mark Cousins and Tilda Swinton and the board of Trustees of the 8½ Foundation.
We need a confident film industry professional with lots of experience on the business or legal side to negotiate DVD wholesale purchase deals from distributors and producers, to be used by Mark Cousins’ and Tilda Swinton’s new organization, the 8½ Foundation. This aims to get Scottish kids excited about world cinema by convincing them and their family and friends that their 8½ birthday is their movie birthday, so they should see a great film on that day.
We will supply the kids with DVDs of great films that we will have purchased in bulk from rights holders in Iran, America, Britain, France, Czech Republic, Denmark or Senegal. We will not get involved with rights, we will simply purchase. But we need great deals, and someone who can negotiate those deals.
The key responsibilities of the Industry Producer
- Identify the rights holder of the titles that Tilda and Mark have chosen
- Negotiate great purchase deals with them, plus the right to use clips of the films on our website and to subtitle the films
- Together with Mark, Tilda and the Project Manager, convince the film industry that getting great world cinema for kids is a noble cause and, therefore, should be supported
- Work closely with the Project Manager, especially to help secure edit suite down time and DVD facilities' support
- Where necessary, deputize for Tilda and Mark on this project
- Manage your allocated budget
- As this idea catches on, we hope that the film industries around the world will come to support it financially, or with tax write offs, or with donations of DVDs. The Industry Producer will be well placed to spot any such moves to support us and, if we work well together, they might want to extend their relationship with the foundation beyond the two-year period.
Person Specification
To do this job you must:
- Be good at deals
- Know how the film industry works
- Be charming
- Love kids
- Love movies
- Love Scotland.
You’ll need to be:
- Self reliant, because Mark and Tilda will not always be there
- Hard working, because there is a lot to do
- Persuasive, because this project is full of idealism
- Totally reliable, because we will be promising kids films, so we need to be 100% sure that we can get them to them.
You’ll need:
- A great phone manner
- The ability to write a cracking letter
- Your own computer.
A knowledge of Mandarin or Urdu or Hindi or Polish would be wonderful.
