August is here, and that means it’s time to launch our annual survey of the state of the industry and the people working in it.
We know there’s been quite the glut of surveys knocking about recently, but ours is more important 🤣.
We’re kidding. They all have value and capture information that’s useful, and the more people who take part in them, the more representative of the industry the data becomes.
We didn’t used to need to conduct a survey ourselves, as Stats NZ did a fairly significant one – until 2019 when they pulled the plug.
It wasn’t perfect, but what is?
The Stats NZ survey inevitably did a bit of double counting, as many people in the screen industry perform more than one role, and productions turned up in more than one segment of the screen sector (which Stats NZ roughly split into Screen Production, Post Production, Distribution & Exhibition, and Broadcasting).
But it did highlight the amount of production activity and how that varied from year to year, the “Peter Jackson effect” of large scale international productions shooting and/or posting here, and the amount of money being spent in different regions around the country.
If there was a significant challenge from the industry’s POV, it was that the info was being collected for government, in ways which assisted apples with apples comparisons between a number of sectors of the overall economy. The data collected wasn’t necessarily what was valuable to the industry.
Everybody bitched and moaned about it when they had to fill in the Stats NZ survey (and it did take quite a bit of effort). Then, after 2019, everybody bitched and moaned that the data Stats NZ used to collect was no longer being collected.
MBIE has picked up some of that work, with its own results released in 2020 and 2024, but which lumped together a lot of what were previously separate segments of the sector.
The data we collect via our survey isn’t as empirical as what Stats NZ collected. We don’t force people to take part, we don’t ask about $$$ and, although we ask those who do to provide some demographic data, we don’t slice and dice to make it representative of either the industry or NZ as a whole.
Why don’t we do that? The one word answer is: Money.
If we had the sort of budget available to us that Stats NZ or MBIE had, then maybe we might do what they did. But we don’t and, in any case, we’re more interested in people’s experiences because (despite having added some questions about use of AI to this year’s survey) we’re still of the opinion that people are what’s important to the industry.
It’s all about you.
Maybe there’ll come a day when the machines take over and the only thing we have left to do is the stuff the AI doesn’t want to do, like cleaning the loo and emptying the bins. Until that time, and certainly as far as jobs requiring creativity and decision-making about creative activities are concerned, people will remain the most important part of the mix.
With our survey we’re interested in the people who are part of the industry (or aspire to be part of the industry), not in an intrusively personal sense but as part of a whole.
We collect the data, we anonymise the data, and we analyse the data.
We can’t survey every little detail of your working lives, but we think there’s value in building a picture that collects some info that provides a snapshot and – with the questions we repeat from year to year – can help identify some trends. Information about those trends can contribute to debates and discussions moving forward.
We’ve been conducting this survey and collecting this data each year since 2019, so this is the seventh edition. And we’re very happy to welcome back our sponsor for the survey, Xtreme Forwarding, whose support enables us to conduct it and enables Emma to do the work of turning all the data into slides for our videos.
Whether or not you’ve taken part in previous surveys, your input this time around is welcome and important. The more of you who take the time to complete the survey (between 3 and 9 minutes), the better the picture of the industry the data will present.
And, just in case the warm glow that comes from doing your bit isn’t enough of an incentive to dive on in and answer some questions, we thought a bit of bribery might help. Do your bit, complete the survey, and you’ll go into the draw to win $500 and 5 years free membership to ShowNews.
Hop over here and tell us what you really think. And feel free to share that link with friends and whanau in the industry. The survey’s open for the month of August, so get stuck in. We’ll remind you via our socials and newsletter when the deadline starts creeping up.
