The highlight of last week has got to have been the Hello Digital festival, the Midlands first digital festival which took place at Millennium Point in Birmingham with an associated Hello Digital in Hereford. The festival attracted some of the leading names in digital media including Pixar, Channel 4, MySpace and Flickr, and delegates were given the opportunity to listen to and question them. This alone, demonstrated the importance of this festival, and it was fantastic to see the digital media companies from our region taking full advantage of this rare opportunity.
One the key festival events for Screen WM was the regional launch of 4iP, which drew a large turnout of delegates for the unveiling of Channel 4 and Screen WM’s £10 million joint investment 4iP fund, supported by Advantage West Midlands.
This was accompanied by the announcement of a £1.3 million support package which will be delivered by Screen WM to support digital screen media in the region and will help with 4iP project development, major networking and showcase events, attracting top level commissioners to the region, and innovative cross-sector workshops to help encourage collaborations between regional TV, film, games, arts organisations and digital media companies.
It is going to be really exciting to see the kind of projects being submitted for 4iP (Submissions can be made to 4iP via its website, www.4ip.org.uk) and watching the development of those which are successful.
On a personal note, I would have to say a big thank you to James Fabricant,
Director of Business Development and Media, Europe for MySpace who rose from his sick bed in order to be on the panel to discuss Faintheart, the world’s first user-generated movie and whether it marks the dawn of a new era of user-generated content in mainstream media?
Hello Digital / Hello World was both inspiring and educating and I’m already looking forward to the next digital event.