Movie & TV industries set to bring in £1bn to Scotland – as well as 10K jobs

THE Scottish film and TV sector is on track to rake in £1billion a year for the economy, in bold new targets set by the industry body.

Screen Scotland believes they will reach a 10-figure turnover by the end of 2030/31 as more and more major productions continue to be made north of the border.

In 2021 the screen sector in Scotland employed 10,940 full-time workers, with an overall contribution to Scotland’s economy of £627.1m – but now creative chiefs want to bust the billion pound mark.

Isabel Davis, Screen Scotland’s executive director, said: “We think bringing in £1billion a year to the economy is an achievable goal. We’re already on that trajectory and we may get knocked off course – I hope not – but we could also exceed it.”

While media bosses are delighted when a major Hollywood production arrives to film on our shores, they insist it’s TV shows will always be our bread and butter.

In the last few years multi-million dollar movies including The Batman and Indiana Jones and The Dial Of Destiny have made our streets double for Gotham City and New York.

But Isabel believes while those may be the cherry on the cake, the growth in our screen sector has been built on the back streaming shows like Martin Comptson’s The Rig for Amazon Prime and the Netflix cop series Department Q with Kelly Macdonald, which is currently being filmed.

Isabel says: “Yes, we’re absolutely delighted when a big budget movie franchise comes to Scotland.

“But truly the best thing about this job is seeing an industry as exciting as film or TV, and how it affects the life of every individual from Scotland working on it.

“Whether that’s someone from a taxi driver to a sparky or plasterer, to local talent, with a good old Scottish cast in a series like Department Q.

“That’s when it all starts to feel very real for us.”

Along with targets of reaching £1billion a year for the economy, Screen Scotland – which is funded by the Scottish Government and The National Lottery – also aims to nearly double the number of full-time jobs to 20,000 by the end of 2030/31.

They hope to achieve that through apprenticeships, which saw them support over 2,000 trainees from 2018 to 2023.

Meanwhile, last year they secured a further £3m to link local industry, education and training providers, and other screen organisations across the UK, to coordinate skills and training.

She says: “We’ve tripled investment in skills in the last five years with public money working hand in hand with industry.

“But we will definitely need more public money to grow that skills base, which will be able to help us grow as a sector.

“And it’s not simply new entrants either as we’re helping people to return to the industry to retrain them or to step up. So it’s really important that we bring more people in but we also need to retain them.”

Scotland has always been on the map as a backdrop for major movie locations, but with film studios, including FirstStage in Leith and Wardpark in Cumbernauld, streaming services have now been able to make dramas here including The Rig and Outlander.

Isabel says: “Scotland has always traded on our locations but there’s been a shift over the last five year

“Tetris was a prime example of how Scotland can stand in for other locations as Glasgow doubled for Moscow and the schemes of Aberdeen stood in for Communist Russian housing stock.

“Then you also have a Netflix show like One Day where we get to play ourselves and don’t double as anywhere else, as it was set in Edinburgh.

“But the studio infrastructure has really changed the game for us.

“The more Amazon comes here, the more other streamers will come along with independent productions and, as our crew gets more experienced, they will trust us to make even more stuff.”

In the five years since Screen Scotland was created it has directly funded 155 productions.

But they’ve also been targeting visual effects and digital skills to add resilience into the sector.

Isabel says: “The whole industry is on tenterhooks around commissioning patterns, which is definitely being seen on the ground in the UK.

“But in Scotland we seem to have weathered the storm better than in other parts of the UK because we’re not just about those big American films or just about the little stuff, we have a nice balance.

“We get streaming work, independent films and Hollywood productions. So many of the crews here will hop from one production to another. Whereas elsewhere you might only work at the likes of Pinewood so when there’s no productions in the pipeline it becomes a lot more difficult.”

She added: “No matter what is changing in the industry, good content is what makes people watch and that has got to be at the heart of everything we do.”