Ciarán Kissane Talks BAI Sound & Vision Funds | The Irish Film & Television Network

Sound & Vision, the BAI’s Funding Scheme was established to provide funding in support of high quality programmes on Irish culture, heritage and experience, and programmes to improve adult literacy. The fund is financed through the Broadcasting Fund which receives 7% of the annual net receipts from television licence fees.

Round 10 of Sound and Vision is open for submission from programmes that examine Irish culture, heritage and experience, adult literacy and media literacy and global affairs as well as programmes that are to be made though the Irish language. The BAI will only allocate grants to fund programmes that will be broadcast – rather than the development or production of programmes. As such all applications must include confirmation that they have an agreement to broadcast their project during peak times as recognized by the BAI (ie between 6pm and 11pm)

Ciarán Kissane discusses this upcoming round and the previous submissions rounds and his thoughts on the process:

IFTN: When are most projects submitted?

Ciarán Kissane: Right up to the last few days is when we tend to get most projects in. We get the majority of them in the last day or two. That’s the way it usually works.

IFTN: Have you had to ask applicants to re-examine their budget calculation in the past?

Ciarán Kissane: Within the panel stage and the individual assessment stage, budgets and other elements are evaluated, and a recommendation comes out in terms of the number of programmes, and the budget that will go with it.

We would raise issues if we felt that there had been too many crew days allocated or too many editing days weren’t justified. But we make an offer at the end to say “We will give you a maximum of X amount of money, which is a maximum of X percentage of whatever budget that is there, to make four programmes” for example. And people can accept or reject the offer on that basis.

Then if people accept, we get into a discussion about what the final budget and the final treatment is going to be as part of contract negations.

IFTN: Do Irish filmmakers have a good idea of a working budget or do you get many applicants who are somewhat overly generous which their allowance?

Ciarán Kissane: We would have issues with different elements of the budgets...and sometimes we don’t think that they are justified. But the people who are putting together television proposals in this country have been doing it for a good number of years. So, in the last round, only about a third of the applications did not get through the quality assessment stage, and in some cases that was because they came into us without a fully funded project.

IFTN: Once the submission process is complete what is involved in the decision process?

Ciarán Kissane: We firstly check that all the required material has been provided – the letter from a broadcaster, etc. - all the minimum requirements. We then send some of those to an expert assessor if required. We review the expert panel’s reports back, and we do a composite report on those.

We do the first level of evaluation internally, and then we use the external panels to get a view on the project, and we get a variety of views, and we take those views into account. That’s why we get a mix of views back, and within those we get a good spread of opinion.

We take on board the views that we’ve got back, and then our own view of the application, in terms of making an assessment of that application. And then the final element of the process is that a report is presented to the members of the authority, and they have the final ratification of the outcomes of the round.

IFTN: What common problems have applicants told you they have had with the submission process?

Ciarán Kissane: The feedback that we get tends to come after we have given people an outcome of their application. I think something that people find difficult to take is that – despite their application meeting all of the various criteria – their programme hasn’t received funding and that’s just because of the amount of money available.

But in the last round we introduced a new element to the feedback process where we give each of the applicants an overview sheet which sets out how their application fared at the preliminary evaluation, the individual evaluation, and then the strategic evaluation to give them some clear feedback on how their application fared throughout the assessment process.

And that seemed to have worked well because it meant that people had some sense of how their application did work through the process and we will do it again on this occasion.

IFTN: You have a requirement to see that 25% of the Sound and Vision fund goes to Irish Language programming, has that ever proved problematic?

Ciarán Kissane: Not in terms of television, because with an Irish Language broadcaster like TG4 putting in applications that helps in terms of meeting the Irish Language requirement. It is more difficult on radio to make the 25%, but in television we generally can reach the 25%.

If you take the last round where we had around €15m requested for 77 applications, and we were trying to break those down into the number of applications we would fund with the €7.1m available, one of the constraints that came into play at that point was the need to make sure that 25% of the €7.1m went to Irish Language projects. So that gave them an advantage in the strategic phase.

IFTN: Is there a certain quota you have to meet as to programme genres?

Ciarán Kissane: We do have a requirement in the strategic assessment structure that’s in the scheme to insure that there is a diversity of genres and formats. So that meant in the last round, we had a significant number of projects that qualified that were documentaries in either History / Heritage genre, or else ones in Contemporary Society.

If you take History/ Heritage, the total number of qualifying documentaries – that is the total number of documentaries that were coming through the initial assessment phase – were seeking funding of about €5.5m. So there was a bigger number of those that fell out because they didn’t offer genre and format diversity.

In the Entertainment category we had one programme in a particular genre, so that got funding because it was offering diversity, whereas it was much more difficult for documentaries, particularly in the History / Heritage area because the competition was particularly strong and particularly fierce given the number of applications. So we really are encouraging people to diversify the genres and formats that they are putting in.

IFTN: What would you recommend applicants who are yet to send in their submissions to do now?

Ciarán Kissane: It is very clear in the scheme that genre and format diversity is one of the strategic assessment criteria. Given that the overall fund is €7m, people need to reflect that we are trying to achieve genre and format diversity within that, so higher budget projects looking for a higher percentage from the BAI are going to find it more difficult.

The scheme is about high quality, so high value projects will get through, but it is more difficult given the need to achieve genre and format diversity.

IFTN: Is there any genre that gets fewer applicants than any other?

Ciarán Kissane: Media and Adult Literacy is a specific element under the scheme and we only got two or three proposals in that area. Education is another area in which the number of applications was not as strong. Though, ultimately, it is up to the broadcasters and producers to work out what they want to support we are trying to achieve that diversity so I would encourage people to look at that.

For more submission information visit www.bai.ie

Free Industry Newsletter

Subscribe to IFTN's industry newsletter - it's free and e-mailed directly to your inbox every week.
Click here to sign up.