Good morning, and welcome to the 15th meeting of the Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Relations Committee in 2017. I would like to remind members and the public to turn off mobile phones and any members using electronic devices to access committee papers should ensure that they are switched to silent. Apologies have been received from Jackson Carlaw and I welcome Margaret Mitchell MSP as his substitute. Our first item of business today is a decision on taking item 3 in private. Are members content? For our second item of business today, we will hear from representatives from film location offices and industry experts in around-table evidence session on filmmaking in Scotland. I would like to welcome the witnesses here today. Perhaps we could start by introducing ourselfs. Since this is around-table, I will work anti-clockwise. My name is Joan McAlpine, I am convener of the committee and I am an MSP for the south of Scotland. Lewis MacDonald, deputy convener and MSP for North East Scotland. I am Mary Evans and I am the MSP for Angus North and Merns. Richard Lochhead MSP for Murray. Sarah Scott MSP for Shetland. We have just been filming Shetland in Shetland. Ross Greer MSP for the west of Scotland. Stuart McMillan MSP for Grunwick and Inverclyde. Margaret Mitchell MSP, central Scotland. I am Rosie Ellison from Filmed Embraer. Jennifer Reynolds from Glasgow Film Office. I am Colin Simpson. I cover European affairs tourism and film with Highland Council. I am Julie Craig from FiveScreen and TayScreen, serving Five and Tayside. Good morning. I am Marie Archer from Aberdeen City and Shire Film Office. Good morning. I am Alasda Scott. I am from Edinburgh Napier University and part of my role is director of Screen Academy Scotland, which is our partnership with Edinburgh College of Art. John Archer run Hopscotch Films and chair independent producers Scotland. Good morning. I am Laureate Dunn. I am a freelance location manager. Thank you very much. I would like to invite Rosie Ellison to make some brief opening remarks. Thank you very much to everybody for inviting us to talk to you this morning. I run Filmed Embraer, which is the film office for Edinburgh, East Lothian and the Scottish Borders. Filmed Embraer is part of marketing Edinburgh, the destination marketing bureau for the City of Edinburgh Council, and we are also funded by the councils of East Lothian and the Scottish Borders. As a film office, our remit is to promote the region to filmmakers on behalf of the local authority and to facilitate productions filming in the region. Filmed Embraer, we generally work with about 500 productions a year, ranging from low-impact factual TV programmes like Countryphile, X Factor, party political broadcast filming, right through to feature films and TV dramas such as Outlander, T2 Trainspotting, Avengers, Infinity War and everything in between. Since the film office in Edinburgh was established in 1990 and was the oldest one in Scotland, we have supported over five and a half thousand productions in the region, which amounts to over £85 million worth of economic impact. To promote the area, we work with property and landowners in the region who may be interested in having filmmakers use their property. In our case, we find it increasingly important to talk about the value of film tourism as a great interest to landowners and property owners. We have information and photos for a huge range of potential filming locations, which we share with filmmakers in response to a brief. This register is continually evolving. We update it daily with changes or new locations, which we source through promotion events and research. In order to facilitate productions, we work with the local authority on policies and procedures that are film friendly, policies that we check against the other film offices in Scotland and around the UK. Those are backed up by a filming charter with the local authority. We are therefore in a good position to be able to advise filmmakers about timescales, processes and costs to film in the region. We also keep a register of local crew and production services so that incoming productions can hire locally. We work with local education establishments on workshops and promote training opportunities to new entrants in the region. At Film Edinburgh, we are part of an informal network across Scotland of four film offices, the others being Glasgow, Dundee, which is five-screen, Tayscreen and the Highlands film office. There are 13 film liaison officers representing the other local authorities or most of the other local authorities around Scotland. Film liaison officers' role is to support filmmakers in their region, though there is uneven coverage across Scotland due to resources. At the centre of the network sits Creative Scotland's screen commission. It is like a wheel, and we are on the outside and Creative Scotland is in the middle. The screen commission is the first port of call for many UK and international productions looking at Scotland as a whole. They take the lead on proactive marketing and promotion in key markets such as the US and Europe. The screen commission has funds to put towards bringing filmmakers to Scotland, and some of the film offices can complement those with their own recce support. Creative Scotland's screen commission also manages Scotland's film funding and incentive programme, which has been very helpful in the last couple of years since it was introduced. Film officers and liaison services collect statistics to demonstrate the amount and value of production to the local authorities. We share those with Creative Scotland on a voluntary basis in order to help them to create the pan Scotland statistics. In our case, we also use them to benchmark against other parts of the UK, which help us when forming filming policies. In 2015, Scotland brought in £52 million of economic spending from production. UK tax incentives are a huge draw for international filmmakers at the moment, and the weak pound is also helping. With upwards of £2 billion spent in the UK on high-value film and TV drama in the UK, the arrival of Netflix and Amazon and film industry-styled tax breaks for high-value TV, which is spending over £1 million per episode, has been a huge boost to the industry. Scotland has managed to attract Outlander, which is one of those types of shows, which built its own film studio to house a production and has resulted in more crew being trained at a high level and an increase in facilities basing in Scotland, which together makes Scotland a more attractive place for filmmakers. We still need more film studios in Scotland, and we are competing with the rest of the UK, where yet more film studios are being created right now in Wales, Liverpool, London, Manchester and the north-east. Any production thinking about basing in Scotland is interested in the whole package—studio, sound stages, incentive finance, tax relief, accessible and varied film-friendly locations and production crew in facilities, film-friendly local authorities and the co-operation of local agencies and businesses are vital to film and TV production, whether they are indigenous or inward productions. As such, film office support goes hand-in-hand with film studio provision in terms of making Scotland an attractive proposition for filmmakers. We are not the first committee of this Parliament to look into the screen sector and the economy committee in the last Parliament did quite an extensive piece of work on the screen sector where a number of important points were made that were taken up by the Government in terms of helping to support the film industry in particular in Scotland. Some of the evidence from that committee was quite relevant in terms of film locations and incentives for attracting film companies to come here. An issue that was raised by a number of people involved in production was the whole issue of local hire. As you outlined, there are 52 million of economic spending that is attracted, but a number of people working in production raised questions about the amount of local crews that were hired and the benefits to locations, even if they did attract outside filmmakers. One person who gave evidence, Ben Owens, a scenic artist, pointed to the Canadian example whereby you are giving incentives in return for a 25 per cent or 50 per cent local hire. That was also repeated by Bill Doyle who gave evidence to the committee. I wondered whether you could refer to that in terms of whether you think that more could be done to encourage local hire rather than crews being brought in from elsewhere in the UK. Andrea Calderwood raised the issue of, although the tax incentives that you refer to have been very beneficial to the UK as a whole, whether they could be regionalised to be of particular benefit to Scotland. I do not know whether anybody wants to start off on that theme. I have certainly raised the issue at things like the TV festival, the idea of production companies, the idea of having some sort of condition on any funding that they get or any help that they get that they must hire, let us say, a percentage of local services and so on. Most production companies that are inward coming, they say that they would resist something like that. I think that it would certainly be an interesting matter for discussion by Creative Scotland and also with the tax authorities to see whether there cannot be some kind of, as part of getting any of these incentives and funding support, some kind of onus on productions to use local crew and services. Beyond just local crew, there are also different production services. There is an organisation called Screen Facility Scotland and they are repeatedly saying that instead of using the local services that are here, which could be almost anything from transport to camera har or whatever, people will insist on using London-based services. In Canada, my understanding is that, like the Canadians, there is no way that you can make a film or television production in Canada without using a fair proportion of local crew. John Archer, do you want to come in there? The operating point system, I think, so that you have to show that you are working with local people. I think that one of the things that we have discussed at IPS is whether productions that benefit from an incoming production grant shouldn't work with local producers as well, because that's a way of training people up to work on big productions, and then that at least leaves some benefit to the local economy and to people's own careers, so they can develop the projects themselves. On the other hand, it's a mobile business. Some of our best DOPs go abroad to work in Canada and make their living there. However, the more we have great productions here for them to work on, the more they stay at home and develop their careers. Rosie, did you want to come back in there? Benefitting of the UK tax credit means it is a points-based system as well, and you have to hire a local crew, but by local it's UK, so a crew can come from anywhere in the UK. There is further funding within Scotland, the production growth fund, which is also based on how much you spend in Scotland, and that is on a four-to-one ratio. Productions that benefit from that fund, which is managed by Creative Scotland, have to hire locally, whether that's locations or crew or services, and they are coming from Scotland. That doesn't necessarily mean that they come from the town in which the filming is taking place. It can be anywhere in Scotland. The other point is that productions have different needs. They might have crew that they are used to working with. I think that the film sector review pointed to there being about 800 crew in Scotland, possibly 1,000 now. There might be around that sort of level. We may not have enough to service every production here, so people bring crew up with them. Similarly, as John has pointed out, experienced crew here may want to go and try out Canada, London or the US. I think that the work of the film colleges and universities here are doing is critical to the overall package in terms of training young people for the industry, and providing opportunities to learn skills and crafts is just as important as training people to be directors and producers. Following Rosie's point up, the partnership that we have between Edinburgh Napier University and Edinburgh College of Art was established in 2005 to create Screen Academy Scotland, which delivers practice-led postgraduate courses at a professional level to enable students in tertiary education to get to the highest possible level of training that they can as new entrants go into the industry. That has been very successful over the past 12 years, pointing to successes recently like a recent graduate, Robin Hague, who is based in the north-west of Scotland, who has filmed Hula, won the best short drama at this year's Celtic Media Festival and is now going around to various festivals last year. Another one of our postgraduate graduates, Ben Sharrock, directed a feature film called Picadero, which won the Michael Powell Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, showing the level at the top end of creative talent being developed through Screen Academy Scotland. One of the issues that we face currently is that it was established with course enhancement funding, which we have benefited from over the 12 years, which has come from creative skillset, originally the sector skills council for the film and screen media. Currently there's a policy change in terms of how that's delivered. The previous strategy from the British Film Institute has come to an end. In December of last year, they announced the kind of headline points of their new strategy, which runs from 2017 to 2022. But due to various policy delays, the framework of that hasn't yet been announced. It's going to be announced at Westminster on the 28th of this month. Consequently, there's a vulnerability about some of the funding that we have that helps us in our programme of professional development for students and in the various ways in which students can engage with the industry in Scotland. Preserving that and having sustainable support for those industry education links is absolutely vital in terms of a future strategy for sustainable film in Scotland. I'm keen to explore a little about how central and local Government supports your work and the film sector in general. Having heard from John and the previous committee's evidence sessions, I know that things have moved on. In relation to Creative Scotland, our advisers tell us that their guide film in Scotland indicates where there's film studio space available but doesn't provide contact details for the regional film officers. That surprised me quite a bit. I was curious to know if that was symptomatic of a wider problem or simply a blip in somebody's preparation of a website. On Creative Scotland's website, all the film location networks are listed through there. That may have been normally, but the working relationship between certainly the film liaison and the film offices is very strong, as is the referral scheme that links with them. Certainly from my local authority as a film liaison, without the support of Creative Scotland, there would be no way that A, that I was trained to be a film commissioner, and C, the support and the understanding of the local authority and the connections and the wider opportunities that that brings to our region are highly supported by that. In the last five years, we've had an increase in production that has been life changing for our communities. For example, this afternoon I'll go back to Aberdeen where we have a course of 40 young people on introduction to hit the ground running, which is the entry level runners courses. My communities have seen opportunities to have feature films filmed in their local towns. I've had a young person who's come back to film in his hometown as part of a professional crew. We've had young people who've told us that it's been life changing. We understand that the creative economy has a huge power within Scotland in some of our regions that creative economy is only lightly touching our regions. In the north-east of Scotland, film has changed that for us, but we need further support and investment to maintain that in a time when local authorities are having to make some strong choices. Is that a general view? Is it a robust and productive relationship? I would certainly agree from your point of view. We measure where our enquiries come from, and I would say that over a quarter of our enquiries get directed to us through Creative Scotland, so there's definitely good day-to-day work in relationship. There's no job I do that does not have a direct line to Creative Scotland. The amount of support that they provide every production is hugely beneficial. They are the spine in a way. I actually view Creative Scotland as my colleague, so regardless of which production I'm working on with however many people, the fact that there's a direct line to Creative Scotland and that it actively benefits everything from my locations perspective is hugely rewarding. They're interested, they're informative, they're up-to-date, and they provide valuable assistance where needed. That's very encouraging. Can I follow up a point that Rosie Allison mentioned? I think that it's probably relevant, particularly to Marie and perhaps to Julie, since they're both in neighbouring regions. I think that you described it as a network of four film offices, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Highland and Fife and Tayside, and then a different concentric circle of other local authorities. Can you explain the difference between, for example, how you work in Fife and Tayside and how you work in Grampian? Well, I suppose that the idea of a dedicated screen office is different to the wider Scottish Locations Network, and there's a website, www.scotishlocationsnetwork.com, which actually directs towards Creative Scotland to the very page that has us all listed. But the people who have screen liaison duties, they will be part of a wider remit. They'll be, generally speaking, in economic development or possibly a culture department. Mostly, we find economic development and they will have wider duties concerning tourism, different kinds of business development, inward investment, that kind of thing. So the time that they have in offices that are not dedicated to this work is less. It doesn't mean to say that they don't provide a really valuable service, an absolutely crucial service to have coverage across Scotland, but the difference being that, with a dedicated screen office, we are encouraged, and certainly the councils of Angus Dundee, Fife and Perth, can also strongly encourage not just the idea of keeping a locations database and image bank and so on, but also of identifying all the local businesses that can benefit from screen production, of bringing together location owners and business owners to understand the business and engage with it. So I think you wanted to compare with Marie. In Abertein City and Shire, we work across the two local authorities. I'm partially funded by our cultural services department and a small amount of money from our economic development department to cover two days of my time to focus on film. So that's directly as on when we have productions contacting us, but also to build databases and information for productions and crew within the region. Additionally, since we've had an increase in production in the last five years, we've also had a tourism product that relates to screen, which then has added on to the workload of my liaison role. So each local authority will have a different set of skillsets behind their liaison officer. Some will have production understanding, some will be purely planners, marketing people, tourism, and my comment earlier about Creative Scotland. Five years ago, Creative Scotland made a leap of faith and trained some of the film liaison officers for the first time. That changed my ability to do my job and to understand what the needs of a production is coming. I jokingly say that when a production comes in, it's like watching a small army take over your community, except in a good way that can change a community becoming part of that army to make something really special. That role is unique. In the local authority, it requires a huge trust on an officer who may or may not be trained to do it, yet you're asking everything from the roads to clothes to your young people to being licensed to be in the film through to community's landscape changing. That requires a confidence of the local authority and a confidence of the production company in their liaison officer to be able to pull it off with them. That role is quite a difficult role when it's one person rather than the full screen commission. I happen to be in Macduff the day that happened recently, so I know what you mean. But it sounds to me as if you are as much a full-time person focused on this role as your colleague. No, it's two days a week as a film officer and three days a week as an arts development officer within my local authority. Obviously, I try and balance the two to the best of my sides of my posts. Thanks very much. Margaret Mitchell Just before I go on to my main question to pick up on something Julia said about creative Scotland location national film commission and film in Scotland, the directory, which was aimed to point film makers at what's happening with the network of local officers. It does say that, although studio space is available in Scotland, the guide does not provide the list or direct contact details on the regional film offices, so that seems quite a gap. Just talking about my local area, I have no idea, despite being in politics and elected member of various levels from local government, right up that there was a Lanarkshire screen location office there. Does it need more awareness raising? Also, to move on to my next point, you can be tackling together. There seems to be, now at Crossroads, a divide in which we are going. Are we going to more centralise the creative Scotland role and have it as an overview of deciding where things go, which you could be looked at? Or are we going to look at the local location offices as a gateway, beef them up a bit, give them more funding and encourage them to look at match funding so that they can do the kind of things that Dr Scott was talking about. I know that my local area co-bridge colleagues are doing amazing work in cosmetic, artistic or dramatic make-up, media study, all of those things that seems in education, beefing up the local economy. There are real opportunities, so which way should we be looking or is it a balance? If I can say from a Highland perspective, I think to an extent we've probably got the balance about right and we'd prefer not to see it go too much one way or the other. I think there's a need for the centralised resource because when we're trying to do things at a larger scale or whether we're going outside Scotland and trying to attract attention, people don't necessarily recognise the different parts of Scotland, they do recognise Scotland as a whole. On the other hand, when it comes down to a specific inquiry and they're saying what's that road like or who's the owner of that property, that's where your local knowledge that the local film offices have comes in. I think there needs to be a bit of both and I think personally anyway I think there'd be a bit of a concern if we're centralised nor but equally there may be risks in going the other way. Investing, so you have a Scotland-wide network of film liaison at the very minimum that is trained and supports Creative Scotland in the increase of film that we have had. Their role is unique for us all as our film offices. I couldn't promote my region to the scale that we can if we collectively promote together through Creative Scotland. Can I ask is that because of funding or because it isn't beefed up to that extent to cope with it but could it be? I mean the local one rather than just saying we don't have the resources, we know there's pressure on budgets but see we ought to make, wave a magic wand just for example the funding could be made available would that be the way to go? Would there be any disadvantages in that or could there be real opportunities? I think from my local authority because of the scale of filming that has happened in the last five years having the ability to put more time into our film office to actually proactively market it to work with Visit Scotland as a partner our regional visit and tourism partners to be able to tell those film tourism stories you could see an economic benefit come from that investment so there is an argument for that. I'd just like to say I think Creative Scotland has a different role to the local authorities. Creative Scotland is very much a kind of central pool and they are out there in the world selling Scotland as a whole. We as local authority services look inwards if you like. I spend an awful lot of time with various council officers and councillors convincing them that film and television are of benefit to the region whether that be through the tourism impact or the economic impact or the educational impact given opportunities for jobs and training. I don't think that it's of value for a local authority to suddenly go right, we are going to go out on our own and promote our local authority region when that can be done as a central resource and is being done very well. Very well indeed by Creative Scotland who go out to the United States, they've been to Korea, they go to Europe fairly regularly and sell Scotland as a whole, which helps people to come and look at Scotland and see that we have this huge range of locations. The other thing to point out is that each local authority doesn't have a huge range of locations. I can't offer in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders and the Slothian, I can't offer jiggity jaggedy mountains as you've got in the Highlands, we just don't have them, but I'm very happy to refer people to the Highlands film office and to Julie for some of the essential Perthshire mountains if they're looking for that kind of thing. Having this central resource in Creative Scotland is absolutely invaluable, but I think we work well, we could work better, there's no doubt about it. If every local authority had some kind of representation because I don't think it's the whole of Scotland that's covered at the moment. The panel here today is very focused on what we do. There are other film liaison officers who really don't even have a day to spend on film, so there could be, there is a call for more even coverage to make sure that when Creative Scotland is out looking for responses and information about filming all over Scotland that they get responses from all over Scotland so that there is an even collation of statistics around Scotland so that when filmmakers go to shoot in the more remote areas of Scotland there's somebody in the council who can answer the phone rather than having to wait for a Wednesday in a week's time or something like that. Yeah, I just want to emphasise what Rosie's saying that I would say that one of the greatest parts of our job in Glasgow Film Office is having that relationship with other departments in the council to emphasise what filming can bring to the city and build those relationships so that they understand that when Creative Scotland has attracted a production to Scotland that we are able to follow up on what's been told to them, what can happen in a city or a region that we can put them in touch with the right people to make the things happen. Thank you very much. Is the bill worrying you still have to persuade councillors that the films of value to the local economy? Maybe we'll come back to that later. I should say just to put it on the record that prior to my elected department in 1999 I worked in the inward investment section of the economic development department of Dundee City Council and proposed that we set up Filmed on Dee so it's good to see that Tayskin are here today, which no doubt emerged out, hopefully, of Filmed on Dee and that fantastic initiative. My couple of questions goes back to Rosie Ellison's oatmeal remarks, if I picked her up correctly, which is that the spend in Scotland in 2015 that I think he said was £50 million were thereabouts, whereas in the UK it was £2 billion. My quick calculation, but someone will correct me if I'm wrong, is that about 2.5 per cent of expenditure is in Scotland, so that's not good enough, really. I would like to know the panel's views on why we have such a little share of the UK's expenditure in film. What support do we get from the private sector? Be that whisky companies are commissioning very expensive adverts in higher advertising agencies, hopefully Scottish ones but no doubt often London ones who then hire filmmakers in London, presumably. I don't know the detail but I wonder if that is a trend. How are we proactively selling Scotland overseas? A lot of the discussion today will be about what we can offer when film producers and companies come to Scotland, but how are we getting Scotland on to the radar screen of the industries in other countries around the world so that they actually think about Scotland in the first place? The 2 billion is spent entirely on location production, correct me if I'm wrong. I think there is a significant amount of that money spent on the kind of bricks and mortar services, the post-production, visual effects, animation, virtual reality, augmented reality and all of these other technologies that are coming along, and perhaps it's an appropriate moment to mention that. Margaret Mitchell, forgive me if I've got the protocol wrong, but you mentioned about funding. We've been in a position that the councils that I work for have supported applying for external funding and I'll come on to the point about post-production just immediately. We were originally funded with ERDF money, the local regional ERDF money. When we couldn't get that any more we moved on to interreg European Union money and we had an original project called North Sea Screen Partners. We've now done a new project called Create Converge and it concerns the need for a strategy and a policy for development of the sectors for post-production, animation, visual effects, virtual reality and all of those things which are firing headlong down in the south of England, but we're really not having development of those industries at sufficient speed here in Scotland in order to attract that kind of inward investment and spend. I'll leave the studio side out of it because that's been long and well debated, but I think it would be helpful if there were a strategy and a policy for development of those sectors in Scotland and it's certainly something that as a transnational project with nine partners in five countries we're very much trying to do our best to inform that policy. I could just like to say about the £2 billion, plus the majority of that is spent in studio productions, the majority of which are housed down south. There are loads of film studios around London, each with many many stages. Wales has now got about three, four complexes, each with several stages. This is where the money is being spent. In Scotland we have Ward Park studio which is brilliant, thank goodness we have this and other than that we have various sheds which get converted for a short period of time while the film uses it and then they're set back to normal and if an engineering firm wants to move in and take on the 10-year lease then it's off the market. My family thinks that Ward Park is not available to the wider film community, it is only Outlander's studio and even when they are on downtime it cannot be rented therefore it doesn't enter our sphere of studio space at all. That's one of the reasons we haven't been able to get more of the £2 billion that is available out there. We haven't got the studio infrastructure and increasingly we are seeing these kind of high value productions coming in and we had a 35% increase in inquiries from high value tv and feature films in the last year, all of which are looking for studio space. While they might come up here as the Avengers did and use our locations, which is fantastic, we're very very happy to have them here and for us to be able to then sell Scotland off the back of that, they spend a lot more money when they choose to base here and could spend, as Outlander does, nine months of the year filming, creating jobs for people, creating training opportunities for young people. I don't think that we're just calling for one studio, I mean what we have in Scotland is one studio with Outlander filling every stage going there. What we need is and what exists down south and the reason they're bringing in so much money is that there are a range of studios in different places to facilitate different kinds of productions, different sizes. Around Atlanta in Georgia there are I think it was 18 different studio complexes that are all around the city. They've created a film academy that trains crew to keep people local and to service the productions that come in. I mean that's another thing that's come up when talking about studio here. We could create all the studios in the world but we will also need to drive crew to work here and live here but this is one of the issues that we've had in Scotland with the kind of feast and famine industry where we have a splurge of production and then suddenly it goes quiet and the crew leave. It's difficult for people to sustain a career and this is something that was in the film sector review report from 2014. People have, there are a few like Laureate who have decided to stay and let's hope she stays. It's a fantastic track record but many do leave and go to London or elsewhere because the work hasn't been there. The hope is that if we can create studios and we have the continuance of the UK tax credit or similar plus incentive finance to cause productions to look at Scotland we can attract productions to stay here and to shoot over many many months hopefully many years giving careers and opportunities to people who want to live here. I think the basics is when a production comes over here an international production will come over and when they come they are looking for everything as Rosie says they want a studio but they also want their locations. The benefit of a studio is it provides weather cover and it also gives you flexibility. For example you might build the inside of a castle in a studio rather than try and do it in one of Historic Environment Scotland's properties. What happens more and more is that productions will come over and they will only come for the key locations they need because the studio does not exist so instead of us getting an entire production which will automatically result in employment locally and across the whole country we get this small amount people will bring in their entire crew because their production base is elsewhere where the studio exists so we don't see that in our reports we don't see the same amount of spend coming through and that's why people go gosh i didn't even realise such and such a production were in because they move quickly they shoot a location they take the entire crew and their own location in another country so with the studio we will be able to provide so much more in the way of jobs and benefit our economy dramatically. Excuse me problems is a continuity and consistency of funding one of the ways in which Screen Academy Scotland has engaged with the industry in addition to our degree programmes was through a project which was called Screen Nets which was funded through Creative Scotland with the the film skills fund that was made available by Scottish Government in 2016 announced in the autumn of 2015. This project has been very successful in terms of finding and developing young trainees and engaging those trainees with the high-end television productions that have come to the country but also with the the feature films that were made here last year that's a great way for developing trainees and giving them the skills that are needed for the incoming productions however that was that was a one-off that's that was just for that year and the lack of continuity is is a real problem if you're trying to build a sustainable industry if you're trying to get young people who are training or educated in in the skills necessary for the industry if you're going to allow them to to believe that they can have careers that are based here rather than have to look elsewhere and have to move south inevitably because there's this fracturing of of jobs available so finding a way of having a strategy that can make things more consistent is I think absolutely vital. Thanks very much Ross Greer. Thanks, convener. Just going back to the convener's original question the evidence that Ben Owens had given to the previous committee in session four this has been touched on site I think in answer to Lewis MacDonald but one of the things he mentioned was for those working in the sector particularly self-employed people to find employment the example used in Canada was of the provincial film commissions having live production lists on their website with dates of production with full contact details for folk to get in touch directly and that was boosting employment making it easier for people to get in and he recommended that for Scotland has that been developed since he gave that evidence in session four? Most productions don't want us to do that as a starting point. We would be in breach of confidentiality if we put details such as those kind of details on websites productions reach a certain point when they do want to start crewing up and at that point they will speak to those of us who have got lists of local crew and ask us to either put the message out to them for them to send in CVs and get in touch or we send the production company their CVs and put them in touch that way around but in terms of an online production list of forthcoming productions it doesn't happen at all. Can I just on that point because the point you raised about confidentiality was my first assumption when I read this but I couldn't think of why British Combo and Ontario would be so radically different to here for why is that working for them why has it been cited as a useful example but it wouldn't work here because I had the same thought as you about confidentiality. If I can add from our point of view confidentiality is certainly one issue I think the other side that we see from some of the production companies is that whether in a relatively remote area it might be okay they could make it a bit clearer what they're doing and where when you get to some of the more populated areas I think there's a concern that particularly for better known productions you'll get lots of people out to watch it it'll start interrupting them actually undertaking the filming so I think they're kind of cautious about making things too public in that sense so going through likes of ourselves direct to the crew rather than putting it out too publicly seems to suit them better. Just highlighting film bang for production services and things in Scotland as well because obviously external productions get that shared with them as a website but also were given the actual paper directories when they come into the country and just from my perspective when we talk about crew it could be as specific as having the TV aerial man locally hired rather than brought in to remove all the aerials for whisky galaw and put them back up every night so you know when we say crew I think we need to think about the professional film crew but also the crew that is used on the ground within those communities and that does come down to local knowledge and who's the best and who's going to turn upon the job on time. Thank you. Thanks very much Stuart McMillan. Thank you. The issue of the film studios. Obviously a few examples have been provided thus far and also that there has been the situation in Scotland but surely film studios are owned predominantly if not solely by private businesses as compared to the state. Is that not the case in elsewhere as well? Yes. In other countries in Europe that we deal with through our European projects they are places like Arhus for example in Denmark, Central Denmark they saw it as a real help to create a publicly funded studio and although it's not the most glamorous of studios but it's certainly a fully functioning very large studio and they found that's helped them to bring in quite a lot of the sort of scandic noir productions that have been going. I think it's where there might be a market failure. One of the challenges for studios is finding a studio operator. Really there's not that many studio operators and increasingly Pinewood as a business is tending to want to do more of a kind of what they call a dry hire than a wet hire situation which means that they will basically allow or do a deal with companies like Disney to take over some of the stages on a sort of full maintenance basis bringing in all their own crew and so on that they're really only responsible for keeping the place wind and water tight as opposed to in the old days where these studios would have you know perhaps several hundred of their own staff to support productions so they as I said but comes back to this thing of the challenge of finding enough of the appropriate operators to run studios and also operators in typically Pinewood would want quite a significant share of profits for example and quite a large fee in order to run studios let's say in Scotland that that's an element that might need perhaps initially some kind of government support. The reason I posed the question is because I've heard this morning and also heard before in this committee of the shortage of studio capacity in Scotland but if that studio capacity isn't near but if it's the operators or the film companies themselves if they don't actually want to invest in actually building a film studio in Scotland then is the argument that's coming from yourselves is the argument that the state should then go and fund studios in different locations within Scotland? We know that there are at least well there's a pentland studio on the table which is an entirely private sector project and here in the Edinburgh city region we are very grateful that the government gave it green light for planning permission in principle recently let's hope it goes through all the way. There are other proposals out there and people working together to try to get studios off the ground from our point of view the more the merrier really then we'll just need more crew to facilitate the productions here and that may take a long time as I understand it this is one of the difficulties when the private sector are looking to take on a studio project there's a high level of risk obviously and without us having a much larger crew base to service productions coming here it makes it a you know well that's part of the risk element of a studio development one of the things that works for other studios around the country and around the world is a studio complex that has other rent paying rates paying tenants around the side who can carry on paying the rent even if the studio is to stand empty for a few months and that's certainly that's something that the pentlands proposal has got within it there may be others that are built on that model certainly bristol has that Liverpool has that Manchester has that I don't know about the pinewood ones I'm not an expert in those well I think the difference is what you touched on right at the beginning is having extra fiscal incentives in Scotland and through the screen leadership group report there was the mention of the idea of VAT on cinema tickets being put into a film fund the reality is that any extra funding that can come to a production makes it very attractive to people looking where they're going to film around the world and if Scotland had that then it would be much more practical much more realistic for someone to want to invest in a studio in Scotland because then people would be accessing an extra fund so anything that can be done to add to the film funding would be terrific and I mean I think Scotland as a whole has been underdeveloped in its production businesses for a very long time and at the moment we've got the prospect of the new BBC Scotland channel which is the first bit of optimism we've had for a long time and I think from the screen leadership group report one of the things that I'd really like to see government taking on board is the BBC even now putting up an extra 40 million into Scotland every year 20 million for the channel 20 million for network production and the suggestion alongside that is the doubling of the funding for Creative Scotland and their film unit and that would bring us up to about the same level as Northern Ireland gets for their production and that to me is the big issue for government to be tackling in this area if you could get that right that would be a tremendous boost and if we missed the opportunity of this BBC Scotland channel which many in the rest of the BBC will be willing to fail they don't like the fact that money is coming to Scotland they want to see it collapse whereas the rest of us want to see it as something which is going to grow then my plea to you is to actually see in the letters you've written to Creative Scotland and the Scottish Enterprise you have told them they need to work together it's long overdue and what can Scottish Enterprise do for the screen businesses in Scotland to take advantage of the new channel that kind of growth is the important growth I think to see and if I just give an example of one company that has grown over the past 20 years what I think is a sort of perfect way Sigma Films Gillian Berry and David McKenzie started off making shorts paid for probably mostly by Scottish Green shorts like California Sunshine they made a low budget feature the Last Great Wilderness then David made Young Adam and starred up films gradually growing in scale he made his first Hollywood feature Helen Highwater and now in Scotland he is developing a 70 million Netflix production which is the kind of thing we'd love to see attracted in Scotland but this has been grown from within it's a story of Robert the Bruce the Outlaw King and that should be a huge boost to the economy we need more Sigmas we need more companies capable of developing those projects but they can't do it on thin air they need support I think you've touched on an important point there and I think Julie had mentioned earlier about support for post production as well the impression I'm getting from the evidence that received here reflects evidence that I hear from speaking to people in the industry and also from the cross party group on culture that I convene is that actually Creative Scotland is getting it right now but there's still a big question mark over what the enterprise agency Scottish enterprise is doing would you say that was reasonable yes I think that it is very clear in the report what needs to happen the film unit which has been proposed for Creative Scotland needs to be given the chance to grow but it can't when Scottish Green was set up all the ambition was there 20 odd years ago but there wasn't the funding it couldn't be done this is an opportunity to take to put the funding into it if you can't make it work off the back of the the bbc's investment which has been the investment that's been denied us for so many years then we never will yes support angle and I think if we maybe move away from film for a moment just as an example in the area I'm from and around Inverness there's been some investment in the life science sector but that was only kick started by there being some public investment and that's then starting to give this kind of cluster effect and I think in a sense what we're looking at here is saying the industry might not jump in and take the risk themselves but if the public sector supports that initial phase then the industry will come in and the cluster effect will see it grow and take over itself so it's maybe just that kick start that it's needing rather than necessarily that something has to be publicly run well into the future. Richard Lochhead did you want to come back in? Yes, I'm really excited with the idea of a Netflix series on Robert the Bruce played by Chris Pine although I would have been available myself for Robert the Bruce of course. You mentioned John Archer in terms of the public agencies working together and I wanted to ask Lorette Dunner a question about that in terms of the Team Scotland approach to making Scotland's locations and facilities available to productions. So there's a case in my constituency which I'm kind of trying to pursue where we've got a former RAF base, RAF can loss, which is a massive site, largely unused by the army that moved in. Therefore we've got all this spare infrastructure and capacity and many people have told me that that'd be an ideal location for film work, you know empty hangars, lots of space etc and on the border of the islands. So do you feel there is a Team Scotland approach because when I raised that with the MOD they didn't object to the idea but they weren't exactly full of enthusiasm and they were more inclined to think of the problems as opposed to the opportunities. So I just wondered whether you felt there was a Team Scotland approach to making it easy for filming to happen in Scotland? It's an interesting question. Some days I would have said yes and other days I say no. It depends on which direction I find myself travelling. If we're talking about the MOD I have to say I've filmed with them fairly extensively in the last few years and I find that even in that period of time they've become very much more focused on bringing in new business and that includes filmmakers. So doors which were once firmly closed have started to open there. It's interesting, every production differs as you can imagine from every other one. I find when I work within, as I always do within the country, although Creative Scotland, as I was saying earlier, is a key factor to me, all the regional offices are incredibly important as well. So knowing that wherever in Scotland I'm aiming for there is somebody there to help facilitate that and who also has experience and that I think is the key, it's the experience. And that experience helps the doors open but also there's an underlying current whole time of the fact that these regional offices are moving forward, that almost every day they are opening the eyes to another new business or another new landowner that filming is a possibility and it is a bringer of investment of however short term. So I see it as positive. I think Team Scotland, I would probably say yes. I think that there is a strong feeling of let's make this happen, you know, filmmaking, TV making, whatever level we're on, it brings jobs and it brings good things. Stuart McMillan, I think you wanted to come back in. It was a separate question on a different area, if that's okay. I accept that the film industry is a global industry and various factors and elements will come into play on a regular basis. In terms of political change that happens and also the question certainly within Scotland and UK regarding the European Union position and some EU funding has been touched upon earlier on, have any of you had any discussions with the public bodies regarding the potential outcome post the UK leaving the European Union and how do you think it would actually affect what you're trying to do in Scotland? That's largely because I have a European role within Highland Council as well as the film one. I think in short we see there will be some impact on any form of business, partly due to uncertainty, partly due to potential changes in access to markets and that might affect things like collaborative projects but I think it's fair to say that we haven't honed in specifically on the film industry and looked at whether there'll be any impacts there that won't apply to other sectors. As an office that's benefited significantly from European funding, obviously it is a concern going forward as to what, if anything, will replace that opportunity. We're not saying replace that funding but replace the opportunity because currently we're in a position to be able to coordinate and assemble projects that apply to schemes such as Horizon 2020, to European Union, the creative fund that they operate as well as to various interregs. Unless we get, I suppose, some kind of Norwegian-type deal in the future, I don't know what people feel about a Norwegian-type deal but if it was something like that that would enable us still to apply for funding but even when Norway is involved in projects they're not able to access, to my understanding, the central EU money. They've got to, in effect, match it with their own government money. It's just that they're part of the same scheme if you like so I think it is a concern but I'm afraid I don't have answers as to what the future might look like. Creative Europe is another place to go to, to get funding, development funding and production funding and our most successful production in that it's sold to 30 countries around the world is a story of film and the initial funding for that was a development grant from the media programme which is now Creative Europe. Whether that money remains for screen production and screen development is the question that producers have because obviously the money comes from us to begin with so if we're no longer part of Creative Europe will that money come to Creative Scotland? Will it go to the BFI or will it just be siphoned off elsewhere? Only about 4% of the inquiries and the productions that we get in the region are our drama, high value dramas. The rest of it is documentaries and corporates and light attainment and so on and these come in from all over from Scotland, from the UK, from Europe, the States, all over the place and it's that kind of production which may be affected by Brexit. I mean if there are increasing tariffs to get here then that might have an impact. As for the American productions coming in well they would pay tariffs anyway at the moment and the weak pound is making the UK an attractive place to come at the moment. I have a colleague in the film office in Kent who has reported something that's come up from Brexit in that they had a long running Netflix series that operated both in Kent and across in France and they lost it due to the risks of Brexit but we haven't here experienced any loss yet as a result of the possible future so it is still hard to say how exactly we'll play out. You talked about interreg and I was just wondering for some of the other bodies as well how big a feature that's played in your operations and if that will be a big hit for you. Glasgow film office was a European funded project from 1990 to 2008 then with the increase of the European Union around the same time the funding ended and since that point our staff has been reduced from six to two and we're now fully funded by Glasgow City Council. We don't have any direct funding in Highland that goes into the film office but on the other hand I think there are impacts in a sense in a secondary sense so we rely on some infrastructure for productions that have perhaps has perhaps been funded by European money in the past so they're even if not direct to the film office I think there's still an impact from funding side. Some of our productions have had money through the leader programme but that's the only connection at the moment. One of our postgraduate talkmasters programmes is a partnership with a university in Portugal and a university in Estonia and is funded through the Erasmus scheme so clearly how that is impacted will have an impact on one of the programmes. Does anyone else want to come in at that point? I find that we get beyond the original ERDF it's not really been absolutely directly and solely for the functions of the screen office we've had to if you'd like explore other opportunities in order to attract that kind of funding but that obviously the quid pro quo is we have to deliver on those projects and while we willingly do that obviously that does take time away from your sole focus on being a screen office. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're just about to wind up now but if there are any other issues that you would we have a little bit of time in hand if there are any other issues that haven't been raised with you that you think are important to your sector we have a few moments in hand that you can raise them. Connection of the film tourism side. Jenny Steele in Visit Scotland has been doing an amazing job promoting the products that we've had here in Scotland but as that increases that's going to mean increasing challenge for Scotland of how to use that resource and when that resource goes out to market that's another way of marketing our country has opened for film and you had raised whether film could be included in Scotland 2020 as part of that. I think it was Rosie who had mentioned in our discussions that she had not found a film particularly mentioned in the Scotland 2020 strategy. I'm not an expert on Scotland 2020. I'm certainly having tried to identify that myself it didn't seem to be the case. I was just going to add on the tourism side certainly in areas like the highland being featured in films has been a key driver of bringing visitors to the area but that in a sense then has potentially a negative impact on future filming some of the areas that have been really popular like the Isle of Skye we're now getting to the stage that film companies are interested in coming filming something else in Skye but Skye's so popular with the visitors that they can't get the accommodation for crew and so on while they're there so in the way these things are it's a nice problem to have we'd rather be busy than not busy but they can put pressure on infrastructure and I think that's probably quite typical of certainly all rural areas but equally I guess it's probably an issue on a seasonal basis in our cities and so on as well. Well actually we had a round table with the tourism industry last week and that was one of the issues that came up particularly in Glasgow in Edinburgh and we were told that there was a big international conference in Glasgow that Glasgow lost because they just didn't have enough high-end hotel accommodations so it's interesting if it's affecting your sector as well. Recently we've been making this film outlaw king that John had mentioned and there was an area in Scotland that we were particularly interested in filming in but we are not going there because we cannot quickly find accommodation for the crew. Right, where is it? It's actually, I'm sorry, it's an average integer. The one benefit of the oil downturn is actually we actually have to bear hotel rooms but we struggle to get crew in. It took every agency that we could to house the crew for whisky galore and for stone mouth and there's a future production that might be on the cards that I worry where we're going to house them. Okay, thank you very much for coming together your evidence today. Part of this process is for the committee to engage widely with the sectors in our remit so that we can discuss our work programme going forward. So if there are issues that are raised today we can then drill down later on in the next session to perhaps focus on particular issues affecting screens. So if there's anything that you would like to follow up on, you're very welcome to submit written evidence to us after today's session. Thank you very much. We're now going into private.


Hi friends and subscribers, and welcome back to my YouTube channel, my name is Daniel Rosil. I got a comment here the other day asking a few personal questions, all of which I'm happy to answer. One of them was, are you an Israeli citizen? And the answer is yes. I immigrated to Israel under the law of return in 2015 and since then have held dual citizenship of both Israel and Ireland. The second and third questions were a little trickier to answer. Have you served in the IDF and if no, what are you doing to help out with the war effort besides making videos? This one's a lot more complicated. The short answer is that no, I didn't enlist in the IDF. I was offered the option not to serve and I took it. The reason for receiving that option in the first place had to do with a combination of factors. Firstly, I immigrated to Israel just short of my 26th birthday. At that point in time the IDF was only asking for six months of service for those aged 22 to 26 and shortly after the army announced that it would no longer draft immigrants in that age bracket at all. My guess is that they began applying the policy some time before it appeared in the news. In Israel, however, everything is possible if you try hard enough. So although my low health profile and age and lack of Hebrew probably made me a very unattractive prospect for the army to draft, I reckoned that if I pushed to be enlisted they might have had me. So my decision not to serve was I felt really that a decision and it's a decision about which I continue to have very mixed feelings. I felt that I could contribute very little to Israeli society in six months of army service as a back office worker and that the time could be better spent looking for my first job and improving my Hebrew. The army also offers very meager grants for conscripts and I was worried that I couldn't survive financially in Israel if I did join the army. The army suggested that I would be a good fit for the spokesperson unit, but that would have required signing on for a full three years, which again it was longer than I thought I could live on on my pretty diminutive life savings. I felt that my objective of living in Israel for the rest of my life would actually be better served by not joining the military for six months. Not having served in the army, however, is a decision that in some respects does haunt me. It's commonplace for Israelis to list their military service on their resumes. So when I'm interviewing for jobs, it's pretty hard to avoid having the conversation of why I didn't serve. The Israeli army is also famous for being an amazing way to integrate into Israeli society and to quickly improve your spoken Hebrew. Although I feel like I've dedicated a lot to living in Israel, I do sometimes struggle with the feeling that I haven't quite paid my dues as other Israelis have. When I hear of friends picking up their lives to serve in Gaza at the moment, it does make me feel even worse about that. As to what I do, well, volunteering options are currently available in abundance, although I've actually been surprisingly busy with work since this conflict kicked off. However, I have volunteered a few shifts in a logistics warehouse, purchased products from the south whenever I can, and taken part in some digital campaigns like archiving footage from October 7th. Everybody makes difficult life choices from time to time, and we're not always fully comfortable with the decisions that we took. That probably sums up how I feel about not joining the army here. Want to get more videos from me? Then please consider subscribing.


how's it going forexers now guys welcome welcome welcome back to yet another amazing video from australia my name is tapu and it's time guys today i've got some juicy choice man i've got some juicy choice my gun okay the forex sniper is back and i'm back with a bang euro doll jp usd aut usd gold and the s and p 500 all lined up pretty nicely for me and you to extract some pips and put some money in our bag guys i'm back if you just told me for the first time um this is pretty much a segment of my youtube channel called train and talk basically where i come to practice what i preach is where i come to show you guys my analysis and how i intend to extract money from the market uh like i said earlier at the beginning of the video my name is tapu all this i've been doing this for about 13 years yes a very long time so trust me when i say my approach and my strategy to the market is one of the best i use an uh i use an approach called the top down analysis so sit there and go nowhere i'm going to be taking you guys into my screen so basically if you listen to my advice the idea here is if you listen to my advice um and obviously you need to have some background knowledge of training right you listen to my advice you you you basically pay attention to everything i'm saying i see no reason why at least you shouldn't just buy one at least this this end of by the end of april or nine you should have one of these best c-class in your house first just to hold yourself one nice Mercedes Benz c-class type Mercedes Benz c-class in the comments c-class is coming for you guys so yeah i'm about to jump into my chat but before i do that i just wanted to quickly apologize for not being on youtube for quite some time i've had to drag myself back to youtube but i i i just got into a situation i'm actually very personal situation in my life whereby i was like i don't know how to explain it was just dealing with a lot and i just decided to stay away from the camera for a bit um so that i could focus on me and focus on running the business right there's willis capital which is the best prop firm out there in the world so i had to basically stay away from the camera because i wasn't okay focus on me make sure i felt better and then focus on willis capital and then show that we deliver on what exactly it is we have promised we promise live trading we promise real quotes we promise the best spread we promise the live payout so i had to focus on that and also how to focus on me as well and the situation that actually happened to me was a very um has nothing to do with trading but you know life is life like you can have all the money in the world and just guys i'm telling you i don't mean to sound a bit superstitious but when great things are about to happen for you and you know god is literally making good things happen to you there's always going to be one thing or the other you know that's just going to steal your joy away for you know for one reason or the other sometimes it's not your fault sometimes it's your fault and this is another aspect of life people fail to do it's always important for you to take accountability you know so i just found myself in an institution whereby you know it's just like trading i was trying to salvage the whole thing and you know those trades whereby you get into them you know you messed up but you're trying to fix it but for some strange reason that trade just isn't happening like it just keeps bleeding you dry and you just have to wake up one day and say to yourself listen is that i caught this lost short or this shit's gonna drain my account same thing in life there's some situations whereby you know you've given it your best you've tried everything you just wake up one day and you're just like yo two things are gonna happen that this situation kills me or i just have to walk away and save my life and sometimes it's just really unfortunate it will hurt at the time but you have to remember something my dad always is telling me something listen dabs you know sometimes you just need to stop swimming just stay still stay still and relax and just when you know you've given something your best you know you can relate this to trading as well once you know you've given something your best sometimes you just need to stay still and then allow water find this level you wake up one day and just like yo time to close this time to close this situation and let's bounce and obviously i flew to Nigeria to be with my team flew to Nigeria to be with my family for those guys who don't know i'm actually in Nigeria at the moment it's probably been following me on instagram probably see me um guys i have to tell you something man from the moment i stepped foot in Doha right and obviously back to this situation always make sure to take accountability and learn don't blame oh the market makers don't blame anybody else you messed up you messed up take account so that you learn geo i'm saying sometimes it's too late for you to correct whatever it is take account of it i messed up it's okay it's okay and that's why i'm such a good trainer today you have to see i have messed up next time i'll do better right anyways back to what i'm saying so from the moment i boarded the plane from dubai i landed in Doha to catch my connecting flight to Lagos yo bro people started walking up to me in the airport the security stopped me i thought i was in trouble right i thought i'm in trouble yo what's going on and the guys like yo Dapo willis i'm like yeah i'm like i watch all your videos i bought the forex mastery course you're the best because of your forex mastery course i made money from forex and i was able to plan my relocation journey to Qatar i was like wow not too long after i collect security to go catch my connecting flight to to Lagos i'm sat in the waiting room right another guy comes to me say excuse me i'm like yeah it's me like bro i live in italy and i lost my job but after i bought your forex mastery course my training changed and i have the willis captain proper come and i don't even need to go to work your forex course has changed my life i thought that was like i thought that was everything bro when i landed Mutala Muhammad airport in Lagos guy from the from the police from the security agencies everybody was like Dapo willis Dapo willis and guys the reason i'm saying i came out even while i was waiting for my security and my drivers to pull up hi Dapo willis one guy literally came the way he shot me they let him as a guy won't break my heart like and guys yo the love is real everybody just kept on telling me thank you for doing what you do at that point whatever thing it is i was feeling i have to put it aside because i realized that a lot of people depend on me to put food on the table people are telling me i've paid my children's school fees because of the forex mastery program because of your teachers because of trainer talk i've paid like these videos i'm putting out are actually changing people's lives in that very instant i have to pray whatever i was doing i had to come back in front of the camera so once again ladies and gentlemen everybody who i've seen throughout my entire flight from divide to Lagos and everybody i've seen since i've been around that has come up to talk to me i see every single one of you i appreciate you keep doing you and guess what i'm back Dapo willis is back and i'm back to deliver on my promise to you guys i will liberate you guys from your regular nine to five earnings on peacefully changes to actually leaving in the home that you like take care of your family take of your children and take care of your mother once again if you haven't grabbed the forex mastery program the link is in the description as always or around the grab it and liberate yourself so that you can start making money like every other person who watches my youtube now guys enough of all of that once again i love you very much but let's make some money let's go baby all right guys so welcome inside of my screen welcome into the thing i love to do the most which is trading the foreign exchange market anytime i see my charts i absolutely absolutely come alive and yeah we're back here it's amazing to be sharing my screen with you guys as you guys can already see a u d usd is about to melt to the bottom i have euro usd dropping gdp usd dropping and gold lining up perfectly for us to all take advantage of guys once again it's a pleasure to be sat back with you guys um obviously talking about forex now guys before i jump into the obviously the nitty gritties of today before i start breaking down the charts you guys need to do us one favor and smash this actually do yourself a favor and smash the subscribe button right there so that you don't miss out on juicy opportunities like this i can see the channel is roughly about 137 or 38 000 subscribers we should be right about 200k but obviously because i've been away for a bit um and i haven't really been posting that much obviously what here but i'm here to take the channel to the next level why because we're here to spread the gospel of forex how to do things properly so guys you guys heard me talking about the top down analysis and the forex mastery program in the introduction of this video i want to show you guys once again for those of you guys who are students of the forex mastery program kudos to you guys for those of you guys who are not i encourage you to go ahead and grab the program once again the link is going to be in the description as always i'm gonna show you how i use the top down analysis to dissect this chart and give us the best trading opportunities possible don't believe me watch just watch me watch watch alright guys so the very first pair i'm gonna kick off with is AUD USD so let's break these things down this let's break this thing uh let's break this thing down guys um forex mastery students you already know how we roll what do we do first things first we need to go on the monthly time frame to see what exactly is going on um so top down analysis is basically when you go from a higher time frame to the highest the highest time frame which is the monthly time frame identify the overall trend of the market so as you can see on the monthly time frame this market is pointing south we're coming down we're coming down we're coming down and that's for that reason that's why i haven't really been looking for buy opportunities on AUD USD because i always like to what respect the flow of the river look at it this way okay guys imagine if a massive river a big body of water is flowing south imagine if you're going to try and swim against the current of that water it's gonna crush you but think about it this way imagine if it was flowing south and you just take your little boat put it in the water jump in the current is just gonna literally carry you effortlessly into the direction in which you're supposed to be going so this is the same principle that we like to use here on learn forex with dapple willis and forex mastery program is simple we treat in the direction of the monthly time frame is as simple as that so monthly time frame is pointing downwards so all i'm going to be doing is looking for bearish opportunities so once we finish with the monthly what does he come up with weekly and on the weekly time frame from what i can see so weekly time frame is where i come and plot my most my key levels now once again if you want to learn how to plot these key levels you have to get the forex mastery program i teach how to do every i teach people uh you guys how to do it properly so the key levels are pretty much there to guide so if the market is flowing down right the market doesn't just drop it goes down comes up goes down comes up so these key levels are pretty much what what guide the waves as they oscillate towards the downside and they they they they they they are there to pretty much guide you so that you don't start selling into support or start buying at resistance right these major levels are basically there to tell you where the market is most likely going to what turn around so it's very important for you to have them on your charts this they like you can literally sell here and buy like guys take a look at this when the market came in here sold off came here sold off bounce off of here came down here bounce here sold off here so you can see that this guy this ladies and gentlemen these key levels are amazing right so from what i can see here it's very simple no rocket science right aid usd is looking like he wants to melt all the way to the downside okay i can see um this is a clear cut pattern now i'm gonna after the weekly time frame i then come to the daily time frame so on here so on the daily time frame is where we come and try and find the most immediate trend within the overall trend right so from from the look of things uh you mean say guys let me just come so what i was actually trying to happen on aid usd before was it was looking like it was about to be a trend reversal okay let me just show you and break it down for you guys it was looking like a potential trend reversal right around here listen guys around here okay it was looking like it was about to be a potential trend reversal around here we came down here and then it looked like this minor level was holding this bad boy about here and it looked like okay this was a breakout retest continuation to the upside however i told people i'm not really interested in trading this some aid usd bullish why because like i said guys if the monthly time frame and the overall time of the overall flow of the river is pointing downwards i have no business buying because it's going to frustrate you that's why most people don't understand why i just stay away from counter trend trades it is very frustrating and unpredictable i'm not going to be jumping in for 30 40 50 60 70 papers i ain't got time for that bro i need the big bread i need the big bags you know i'm saying i need some big bags so counter trends don't give me big bags trend following though gives me the best reward best return on investment and as you can see we tried and we tried again pam and now the weekly candle has come and closed back down below this trend line so i have no doubt in my mind this bad boy will also flow south and if you look very carefully this was a resistance level that has been holding also acted as a point of support for a period of time we have played with it toyed with it toyed with it we are not currently pointing downwards so the weekly has told me what it needs to know then i come on the daily to try and look for potential areas whereby i can take advantage of this trade now personally personally personally i'm not going to lie to you personally i'm already in this trade okay for those guys that are wondering how i got into this trade very simple and straightforward right i used my counter trend entry strategy which i talk about on module five on uh the forex mastery program um but my first target isn't anything that juicy okay my first target actually the market should just be coming into my first target what time is it right now yes i need to check my bottom need to check my trades when i'm done this i'll check my trades so my first level target for this trade is something around here you're probably saying to yourself this risk reward is not that juicy guys let me let you know the low secret right your first trade your risk to reward is not really meant to be all that juicy the idea of your first trade is just so that you can jump in and start making some profit so that you have some free capital to jump into the next trade let me explain to you what i mean so this trade i jumped in here my stop losses are both here so between here this trade is technically between my entries listen guys between my let's go out in four hours so it's on the four hour timeframe that i usually like to to place my entry so i saw the break up retest continuation so my entries are actually here on this pullback now i put my stop losses all the way up here you can put it wherever it is you want to put it but i like to like i keep telling you guys i manage a significant amount of money so i can't really i can't really be f-ing around i have to do things properly right so entries are here first level target is going to be here why because this is known as the hundred percent retracement now nobody is saying that you should close all your trades here no what i like to do is i like to jump in here no matter what the even if the risk reward is one to one i'll jump in and then when we get here i will then do what they call close 20 percent of my position okay once i close 20 percent of my position i will then move my stop losses pass break even meaning that i've taken something 90 small but it's something and then once we break down here i have all my remaining trades left to run that is one trade the next trade i'm going to be placing is once we break this barrier somewhere around here i'll then be looking for another trading opportunity which you can easily find if you scale to the four hour timeframe okay i'll show you guys and i'm going to be here trading everything with you guys live okay so once you obviously we break down here somewhere around here i'm going to be looking for another entry opportunity to jump in this time around for a for a bigger risk to reward ratio so usually my second trade is generally like a six to one risk to reward ratio um and then obviously the market drops all the way back down now why don't i put no load up too much risk here because at this point the market is still pretty much termed as high risk anything can still happen the stop losses is too far i don't want to risk it so i'll be conservative this is the strategy i'm conservative on my first entry and i'm very very not very risky but i'm i you understand i apply more risk to my second trade why because the first entry has worked it has given me money i've even taken some money put it in my pocket and it's still flowing in my profitable direction so i have no issue with adding more money to that trade because why the trade has been proven approved and tested uh no that's been tested put it has been tested proven and approved you don't carry everything is okay you don't find this giving me the thumbs up so for now what i need for AUD us to do for me i need it to what confirm to me confirm to me my j break down here once you break down here jump on quote quick sell and then we can carry this bad boy to the downside so i am 95 per cent bearish on AUD us i see no reason why this guy should not drop except the good lord in heaven says no sometimes when it comes to forex god be like no i'm not ready for eight years to drop people pray god please help my trade help my trade so i can feed my family help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help You can't force anything, you have to allow things take time, you have to allow certain things run its course, everything in life, you can't rush certain things.  So AUD-US in general in a nutshell, I'm calling next level target 0.62809, you heard it here first on DapSea Radio. For all of you who are Willis Capital traders, here you go, this is an amazing trading opportunity for you guys.  The Forex Mushroom Program will teach you how to do all of this so that you can literally put food on your table consistently. So that's AUD-USD done in a nutshell, let's go back to Euro-USD, Euro-USD has been looking pretty much very juicy. Now let me explain to you guys what exactly is going on with the Euro-USD, right?   Actually, let me put this watch list here so that I know I just crop all of this side out of the screen, I'm just praying for you guys to see. Now, Euro-USD, what's been happening to the Euro-USD, well for the longest time, I mean for the longest time, for the longest time, for the longest time, hold on, I'm trying to give you guys this smoothest analysis for this bad boy so you guys can understand what's going on. What's going on is goodness, goodness, that trend and the very important one and I need to keep it there for reference purposes. So top-down analysis, you guys can see Euro is pointing downwards, right? There's no two ways about it, so technically, I mean I've just been looking downwards. Now, I cut this entire wave to the downside, let me just zoom in so you guys can see.  If you come over to the daily time, you'll be able to see it a bit better. You know what I'm saying? So we got down to just slightly past parity and then Euro started to retrace all the way to the downs, back to the upsides, I say all right, cool. It's time for us to take profit. Now, this profit taking took most of 2023. Imagine profit consolidation taking almost a whole year. A whole year, guys, forex, hey, are you not the thing about consolidation? People always think that the problem is a lot of people can't really identify when the market wants to go into consolidation and I'm a kind of trader, I'm a trend trader so that's why you saw most of 2023, I really stayed away from the charts. I wasn't really putting out that many trader talks. I was doing more of some certain pairs that I was more certain of but I stayed away from the Euro, US, then GBP, US, why? Because the top-down analysis I had already shown that look dabs, this has been a massive meltdown from the upside. It's a massive meltdown from the upside, bruv. It's a massive thing from the upside all the way down. It's a massive meltdown and then after every massive move, there must be a consolidation period. So I just left this guy alone because today is up tomorrow, it's down today, it's up tomorrow, it's down, it will come here, you think it wants to come down to the down that was the main down of before.   Don't play with a range, dude. Don't play with a range. In this game, are you playing?  Anyways, so for the longest time, I just started to watch, sit back, watch and just observe what was happening with EuroDollar. And one thing I like about Forex is any time the market goes into a period of consolidation, most oftentimes are not. We usually form a chat pattern. Now that chat pattern will now be the guide as to what is going to happen next after we break out of the range. Now in this case, as you guys can see clearly, Forex Mastery students, you guys know I taught this on module seven, trend reversals. What you have in front of you here is a clear case of head, two left shoulders and two right shoulders. And this is a neckline for this massive consolidation. Now, first of all, EuroDollar was pointing down.  We're currently in the willy zone pointing down. So overall flow is pointing down. Fibonacci is pointing itself. And now, apart from that, we have a head and shoulder pattern that is also pointing downwards as well. You guys know once a neckline of a head and shoulder pattern breaks on the weekly timeframe. Woof, we're coming all the way back down here.  Look, this is a left shoulder, head, right shoulder. And that is why you're seeing this sell-off right about here on the EuroDollar. This is a left shoulder, this is a right shoulder, left shoulder, head, and this is a neckline. And you guys know once we break the neckline, we must always come and drop all the way to the downsides. The reason I'm adjusting this is for technical reasons. So how do you anticipate where EuroDollar is gonna drop down to next? So I just wanna move this down a bit. I'm actually just put this somewhere around here. Okay, good. How do you anticipate what's gonna happen next? Simple, you just calculate the entire period of the range, okay? So the entire period of the range, because I don't want to be overly optimistic if I just adjust this down here. So chances are that the Euro is going to drop down into this level about here, which was also kind of like in conferences, let me just make sure my blue bars adjusted properly for, I just need to make it a bit lighter. A bit more streamlined. Okay, to move it up to accommodate something, yeah. Good, and as you guys can see, if I draw my trend line like so, this is also looking like, not just the head and shoulder, but this is also looking like a breakout of a trend line. So without a doubt, the Euro is going to drop into this blue bar. A lot of factors are in play here. Do you get what I mean?  Thank you. Let me remove this. I don't want to confuse you guys, okay? So the idea here is we're trying to build a case as to why we should place a particular trade. So these are all the technical things I like to look at before I jump into any trade. Now, from what I can see, the Euro dollar from a left shoulder, apart from the big one, it from the left shoulder and right shoulder. We broke on the neckline, we bounced off. So breakout, retest continuation, break off the neckline. So we're coming to at least come and fulfill the same amount of pips that he did in range. So the idea is anytime the market is stuck in a range, okay? It will break out and do a similar amount of pips that he did while he was in the range. So let's say in range for a buy, in this case, maybe 300 pips now. The breakout will be for 300 pips. So if you're in this trade already, kudos to you, you're gonna catch all of this. Now, if you're not in this trade, you have to literally scan lower. You now need to bring up, for those of you guys who are scalpers and for those of you guys who are lower timeframe traders, this will be very amazing for you. I, on the other hand, I will be looking for pullback into supply areas. I can already identify that this is more or somewhat of a supply zone. So I'm just gonna be waiting. So this is where I like to bring up my supply and demand strategy for lower timeframes just to see what exactly is going to happen. So I'll just highlight some very, very key areas. Okay? So areas of sell-off. And then I'm just gonna be watching to see any pullback. And then I'm gonna be jumping on this to the downside. So that's Euro-USD, guys. And then the good side about Euro-Dollar is, if we can break here, if we break here, ooh! Oh, man. Pips galore. But first of all, our first primary area of contact is this bad boy.  I will hold this trade and hopefully we break here. If we break here, imagine holding using a 50-pip stop-loss to catch. So from here, 1.1, 1.0, so all the way down here. So you're looking about a potential 6 to 700-pip drop with a 50-pip stop-loss. Ah, it's not rocket-sized, man. That is quick, 40, 50% on your account in just one trade and one pair. And normally, you know me, as we continue to make our way to the downside, I will definitely be adding to my positions as we obviously bleed all the way to the downside. So, you know, is what it is. So Euro-USD, I'm definitely on my watch list for a potential pullback. I, like I said, been dealing with it a lot lately. Obviously, apart from that, I've been dealing with it a lot in my personal life. I have been trying to run Willis Capital, which hasn't been easy, run investment portfolio aspect of the business. So it's been a lot. So I just find myself missing trades, which is very annoying, but like I said to you at the beginning of the video, I'm back, is me, you guys, on this chart. We must extract these profits by hook or by crew, okay? By what hook or by crew? So that's Euro-USD, ladies and gentlemen, in the nutshell. Let's go over, I had GBP-USD here somewhere, but let's see why GBP-USD are running away too. The situation with GBP-USD and Euro-Dollar is pretty much very similar. I see no reason why Euro-USD shouldn't drop all the way down to 1.200, which is about here. There's no reason why this guy is just stalling and bearish of this bad boy. And I see no reason why we shouldn't blow out all the way to the downside.  If I take my trend line and draw it like so, this is looking like a pretend, this is looking like a very juicy sell-off.  I'm gonna actually let me scale down to a four-hour timeframe. So I'm gonna be looking for potential selling opportunities all the way to the downside. This one was, this has actually been in range like so. So ladies and gentlemen, GBP-USD heading south without a doubt. I see no reason why we shouldn't be heading south. I'll just be looking for a more refined entry point and I'm gonna be dumping this bad boy to the downside, okay? But the problem is, why is GBP-USD not on my watch list? So guys, we've just covered AUD-USD, which is very simple, straightforward. What are we doing? We're waiting for this immediate support area to be broken to add to our position. Euro-USD, we're waiting for a one-hour timeframe to hold back potentially into supplier region to drop this bad boy with my float past here and float a bit higher, but I'm just gonna be watching. Once again, I will be updating you guys. And then GBP-USD, I just spoke about that. Now over to the S&P 500, which S&P 500 is what pretty much saved my trading for last year. What I mean saved, like it just, I like to make a specific amount of returns annually, right? Just for my own personal ego. For my own personal satisfaction, there's a certain amount of trades I like to make every year. Certain, sorry, certain percentage return I like to make every year. But 2023, the market was just slow. But the S&P 500 was one of those trades that just boosted the whole way to the upside. You guys know I did the analysis live here. I jumped in for a buy here, and then the market was just going and going and going and what, just locking in, locking in, locking in until we've actually gotten to this point. Why buy the market is looking like it is stalling? So yes, why is S&P 500 stalling? It's probably because of the 127 extension, which is here, as if I knew. This is the 127 extension. We're coming here and profit-taking must be, sorry, need to adjust that my level properly. Profit-taking is definitely going on here at the 1.27 extension, not 0.20 extension. I would, it won't be out of place for us to see a potential pullback of S&P 500, probably into one of these regions. We'll play around here for a bit before we continue higher. But without a doubt, I see the S&P 500 making, I mean it's already made brand new highs, you guys, like I told you guys.  So the S&P 500 wait for a potential retracement. Let's see what's happening with oil. I've been lacking oil a bit lately. So for oil, for oil, this is this, right? So this is the typical, how many bottoms, but one thing I notice about these bottoms is for every time we put in a bottom, this is higher than this one, and this is slightly though, slightly. So I can see like some form of a divergence forming around here for oil. So it won't be out of place for oil to just rally all the way to the upside, but this will be its first area of challenge. So for me, I'm gonna be monitoring oil prices, maybe a potential pullback into this region, and then for a fire to the upside, I will be monitoring it. If the trade is juicy, I will take it if not. If I feel like it's too much of a risk, I'm going to leave it. So yeah, I think that's pretty much it. Let's see if EuroJPY is lining up. Let me not analyze too many pairs because I want to actually start dropping a lot of Trader Talk videos. So let me save one for our other. Maybe I'm gonna drop one over the weekend. So let me save for the next time we jump on the Trader Talk video, guys. So don't worry, guys. I'm back once again, and I miss you guys very much. I love you guys. I'm here, guys, and I'm once again, I'm sorry for being away for so long. I've just been dealing with a lot.  Whenever it is, I'm feeling a bit carried away and lost when I'm in Dubai. Coming back to Nigeria just reminds me of why I started in the first place and why I do what I do. And once again, I do what I do because of you guys, man. Like I keep telling you guys I love you guys very much. So once again, guys, this is yours truly, Dapo Willis, I love you guys very much. And sure to grab yourself the Forex Martry program, the link is gonna be in the description as always. I'll catch you guys in my other screen. If there's anything I have forgotten to discuss here, best believe I'll be back in about seven days to break down this chart again. Okay, guys, if you have any questions, ask me in the comment section. If you have any video suggestions, drop them down in the comment section down below and I'll be sure to do a video on it. Once again, guys, I love you, and I'll catch you guys in my other screen. Let us go. Thank you, thank you, thank you for staying to the end of this video. My name is Dapo Willis and it's always a pleasure to hang out with you guys. Once again, if you haven't already subscribed to the YouTube channel, and sure to subscribe, and the link to the Forex Martry program is gonna be around here in the description as always. And sure to grab it and I'll catch you guys in my subsequent videos. I love you guys very much. Take it easy and peace out.