Creative England newsletter

Here is the latest Creative England newsletter, featuring all the great successes of 2016:

Creative England End of Year Newsletter       Foreword It's been a busy year at Creative England, but we have pulled out some highlights from across the company for our final newsletter of the year to share with our Creative England family. Here's to a merry Christmas and more successes in 2017!   Partnering with Barclays At the beginning of the month we announced our partnership with Barclays to co-run Eagle Lab - Flight, an accelerator for creative tech companies. There's still time to apply before the December 31st deadline!   #EnglandisCreative This year saw us launch our very first brand campaign, which celebrates the talent we have supported with the mantra #EnglandisCreative! The concept was simple: promote our talent with our talent, with CE50 company Seenit's platform used to record and edit the video together.    Film successes The films we've supported have seen incredible success at film festivals this year, with screenings at Toronto Film Festival, London Film Festival and Sundance Film Festival, 17 BIFA nominations, three BIFA wins, and supported director Rachel Tunnard winning the Nora Ephron award at Toronto Film Festival for Adult Life Skills.      Gameslab Leeds Last month saw the return of our flagship Gameslab programme with Gameslab Leeds, a three year programme which supports studios and digital companies in the Leeds City Region. This will help develop the games infrastructure in the Leeds City Region and provide investment, mentoring and support to eligible companies. Applications still open!   Investments in 2016 We have been busy investing in and securing additional investment for tech and digital companies in 2016, with £2.5 million invested in creative and digital businesses this financial year. On top of this, we have leveraged over £7 million in private investments, resulting in over 200 jobs created and safeguarded outside of London. Learn more about our investment options here.   Production Services 2016 was a record year for our Production Services team, with records numbers of enquiries handled, productions shooting on location in the English regions and total estimated on-location spend in the regions. In total just under 9000 filming days were supported in the English regions from our work, including Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Peaky Blinders, and The Crown.   Supporting talent with iAMDigital This year we teamed up with Nominet Trust to launch iAMDigital, a £1 million investment fund that supported companies and projects using technology to increase digital engagement and skills. This was to counter the reported stats that the UK is heading towards a skills crisis in digital technologies.    Work with Producers This summer we launched two exciting new initiatives to help support producers starting out in their career. Producer Hothouse saw eight producers placed at six production companies on a professional development programme, whilst Creative Producer Initiative has supported ten producers in two day training modules.   ProConnect Manchester This year we also launched the ERDF-backed ProConnect in Manchester, which will help grow the film & TV production infrastructure in Greater Manchester, which is already the home of so much TV drama. Following a successful summer launch our team have been meeting with eligible companies, with a full programme events starting in the new year.   Games successes Over the last year our games programmes have funded 15 games companies in the regions, with nine coming through our Greenshoots programme with Microsoft, and a further six from our Games Development Fund. Keep an eye on our Games Twitter channel for the programmes running in 2017!   Launching First Bourne In May we launched First Bourne, a digital accelerator in Bournemouth, with Silicon South. This was a fantastic opportunity for SMEs to develop their offering with investment, mentoring and office space. At least half of the companies supported received significant investments from angel investors as a result of the final pitching event - you can read up on the companies we supported here.    iFeatures The films made through our iFeatures programme continue to impress, with Lady Macbeth and The Levelling premiering at Toronto Film Festival and screening at London Film Festival. Our pledge to support female directors has also been proven with our latest round of iFeatures, which has 50% female directors for the projects in development. CE Live January We started the year with our annual event CE Live at Google Headquarters, where we announced our CE50 cohort and had speakers including Caroline Norbury MBE, our CEO, Facebook's Steve Hatch, and MediaCom's Karen Blackett  Read more   Ad Week April In April we held our first ever sessions at Ad Week Europe, one focusing on cross-sector talent development, the second showcasing the magic that can be made from tech companies making the jump to healthcare Read more   Cannes Lions June Another first for Creative England, we held a session at Cannes Lions on what happens when innovative media producers meet future-forward health experts Read more   CE Live: Northern Lights July July saw the biggest event that we have ever held in the North of England, where we celebrated the creative output in the North of England and launched ProConnect Manchester Read more   Gameslab Leeds November Last month we launched Gameslab Leeds at Game Republic's Developer Day. As well as promoting the event we were on hand to provide finance advice to SME game developers Read more   Eagle Lab - Flight Launch December At the beginning of the month we launched Eagle Lab - Flight with Barclays with talks from Sarah Ellis, Royal Shakespeare Company, Adam Rowse and David Shepherd, Barclays, Dan Pinchbeck, The Chinese Room and Dawn Paine, Creative England Read more Other links we like Applications are still open for Eagle Lab - Flight  You have until the end of December to apply for Eagle Lab - Flight, our latest accelerator programme. This is a fantastic opportunity for small scaleable companies working in creative technology. Our Production Fund is closing There are only a few weeks left to apply for our Production Fund, which supports feature films of all genres. Read more on the fund and how to apply here. Gameslab Leeds is open for applications Our Gameslab Leeds programme is now open for applications, learn if you are eligible and how to apply here. 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