With details of news and events in all forms of media, here is the latest Creative England newsletter:

Creative England
December 2017

The Creative Industries are now worth a huge £92bn to the economy, government figures showed last week. This shows the sector has grown by 7.6% over the last year, the largest increase of any sector covered in the report. The Digital Sector alone made up nearly half of the DCMS sectors’ GVA in 2016 (6.7% of UK GVA), whilst Creative Industries represented over a third (5.3% of UK GVA).

Partnerships

We've teamed up with Creative Review and Facebook to launch Be More Boss, our first ever Instagram campaign, highlighting the lack of female-led businesses and encouraging women to be more boss! The campaign celebrates some of the female leaders we have supported, with incredible 3D models of the leaders created by artist Kate Bones. Look out for them on Instagram and Facebook!

This week we launched our first ever campaign to promote our Partnerships work. The campaign, which is running on Facebook, highlights the expertise Creative England can offer to its partners, including matching with innovative SMEs, exposure at high profile events across the regions, and creating and managing accelerator and incubator programmes

Tech & Digital

More than 120 people attended the EPIC launch event on the 1st November. The £600,000 challenge fund was launched in conference, at Truro’s Health and Wellbeing Innovation Centre. Local businesses are now invited to come forward and bid for a share of the challenge fund to help design technology solutions

Creative England-supported RunAClub are running a crowdfunding campaign to Kick Loneliness into Touch to help support the thousands of community clubs across the country who are closing their doors. For every £100 raised they help a community club or project with 'red tape', communications and data management for a whole year. Click here to see their campaign.

Synap, one of this year's CE50 companies, were announced as one of Tech North's Northern Stars in November following success in an earlier heat. Synap is an intelligent online learning platform that helps students to learn more in less time through collaboration and online quizzes.

Carbon Digital, the Augmented reality, Virtual reality and Visual effects agency, won a competitive pitch this month to work with Standard Chartered. This will see it working alongside its Singapore head office, to produce an integrated digital campaign, covering a number of territories. Read their latest blog on our website here.

Games

Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier was released this month by Andy Serkis's Imaginarium Studios with backing from Creative England. The game encourages players to explore their morals and ethics as they drive the fortunes of an ape troop and band of human survivors. Watch the trailer here.

Creative England supported Lockwood Publishing, a leading cross platform developer, has opened a new UK studio in Leamington Spa led by Modern Dream co-founder Ollie Clarke. The studio will focus on add-on projects and games that will form part of Avakin Life, which already has 2.5m monthly active users.

Sam Rushton, our Project Officer for Games & Digital, interviewed Zaum Studios to learn more about their latest game: No Truce with the Furies. Find out about their take on storytelling, genre and role-playing for the upcoming detective RPG in our latest blog post.

Colchester-based Sketchbook Games continue to impress with Lost Words, the platformer game set in the pages of a diary, winning in three categories at the Game Connection Europe 2017 Development Awards. The studio were awarded Most Creative & Original, Best Casual Game and Best Indie Game, as well as a further nomination for Best Desktop/ Downloadable.

Future Leaders Nomad Games have joined forces with Asmodee Digital to publish Talisman: Digital Edition. Now in its fourth year, Talisman: Digital Edition and its many expansions have garnered a loyal following of digital players. The game is available on Steam, the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Film & TV

Paddington returned to cinema's this winter for another outing with the Brown family! Starring Hugh Bonneville and Hugh Grant, with Ben Whishaw returning to voice the famous bear, the production took advantage of the breadth of filming locations across England with the help of Creative England. Find out where the production filmed in our blog.

Creative England supported films have seen incredibly recognition with this year's BIFA nominations! Lady Macbeth led the way with 15 nominations, closely followed by Gods Own Country which received 11. Jawbone, Kingdom of Us and Pin Cushion also received nominations. Make sure you look out for the results on the 10th December.

Peaky Blinders returned to BBC in November, with our Production Services team on hand to arrange locations which recreate 1920s Birmingham. Read our locations blog to find out which locations the stylish series visited.

We returned to New Forest in November for a second networking crew night for the film and television industries, where Andy Brunskill shared his tips on how to raise finance for your film.