The purpose of this preparatory action “Writing European” is to help Europe reach a high level of excellence in creating and writing high-quality fiction series able to reach audiences across borders. It aims to increase the competences of creative talents working on fiction series and foster the emergence of strong and diverse teams of creative excellence (e.g. involving talented scriptwriters, authors, showrunners and/or executive producers from diverse backgrounds and nationalities).
To achieve this goal, the action will support projects that facilitate creative hubs e.g. writing rooms or other collaborative settings. Such hubs will act as accelerators or incubators of talents, by proposing innovative methods to select and guide talented writers from pre-writing/conceptualisation to the actual writing of fiction series projects and potential matchmaking with buyers. The projects need to be concrete and to focus on hands-on process of co-creation of a set of fiction series.
Objectives
The project(s) should achieve the following objectives:
- Increase the competence, knowledge and capacity of creative talents in the creation of fiction series and foster the emergence of strong and diverse excellent teams / hubs of creative talents (e.g. scriptwriters, editors, showrunners, executive producers) coming from diverse backgrounds and nationalities;
- Facilitate multiple concrete collaborations that follow a learning-by-doing approach, focusing essentially on the creative and writing activities, enabling creative talents to work on a set of different projects in parallel and providing creators with optimised working methods and modalities for co-working, from the early stage of conceptualisation, to collaborative writing and to matchmaking with potential buyers.
- Promote collaborative models across linguistic borders in line with European principles and values, such as equal treatment, diversity and gender balance, fair remuneration of creators;
- Provide regular contacts with industry leaders, producers or commissioners of audiovisual works (e.g. distributors, buyers, platforms, broadcasters) to enhance the talents’ understanding of the market trends and dynamics;
- Scout and select talents, for instance through open calls or prizes;
- Equip the creators with:
- the necessary digital skills and familiarity with state-of-the-art developments and/or market intelligence that can affect the creative process (e.g. for example cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence)
- the skills needed to manage intellectual property (IP) as it determines funding of creation and remuneration of creators and it ensures creative autonomy and cultural diversity;
- Contribute to the green transition.
Expected results
The expected results of this action are creative hubs (in the form of writing rooms or other collaborative structures) providing an enabling framework for collaboration among creators from across the European Union (e.g. screenwriters, authors, producers, showrunners) to conceptualise and write cutting-edge European fiction series.
The selected projects should result in developable teasers/mood-boards/other forms of presentation of new fiction series projects, including a sequencing of the main episodes of the first season and a description of the different characters. They should exploit all the creative and business opportunities offered by digital technologies and data analytics. Moreover, the projects should create bridge between both the creation and the market sides of the ecosystem.
Whilst no two collaborative projects are the same, all selected projects should provide creators with innovative models and methodologies to write “high-end European audiovisual content” that could be potentially replicated also in other areas such as for example animation.
The projects should help scout and nurture a pool of European talents, regardless of the country they come from, who consider Europe as their playground and who can write locally-grounded stories for the global market. This would in turn reinforce the competitiveness of the audio-visual industry and strengthen Europe’s creative autonomy.
The territorial focus of this action is: EU Member States.
More information
Preparatory Actions are meant to introduce and test new initiatives with funding for not more than three years. This call for proposals is the first call of the Preparatory Action “Writing European”.
The maximum co-financing rate of is 70% of the total eligible costs.