In this post we will share a summary of the project at large, establishing a solid background on the problems we are addressing and the goals we have set out to pursue. If you read this and think we should collaborate, or if you want to lean more, then please reach out.

Daniel Gjøde
Partner & CEO
daniel@getconnie.com

The goal

Let’s start with the big goals. Here’s what we have set out to do. 
As an innovative European eSign and document management platform tailored to the specific needs of the audio-visual sector, we aspire to succeed with three overarching goals:

1. Be a Safe European Alternative
We want to create a European alternative to a market dominated by American services, ensuring better data privacy and full compliance to EU policies on privacy matters for our customers and those signing contracts, increasing the protection of individual privacy and rights by for persons and companies alike.

2. Enable Competitiveness
We want to improve and accelerate the effectiveness and competitiveness of film- and television companies across Europe by equipping them with a tool that is directly tailored to their needs as AV companies.

3. Radically Improve Compliance
We want to make the european AV industry "compliant by default, by radically improving transparency and compliance in the AV industry, through the digitisation of documents and agreements, and leverage our future network effects to create a harmonising and improving effect on the industry.

These goals are big, long-term aspirations that underlines our beliefs as a company, and sets the context for our work on this action (EU uses the term ‘action’ about a project that receives funding, so you might see us use these two terms interchangeably). Let’s dive more into what that means and why it matters.

Why this matters

The need for innovation and resilience
The demand for innovation and resilience in the European film industry has never been greater. In a world of rapid technological evolution, dominated by strong non-European influences, European filmmakers face the challenge of crafting compelling stories on increasingly tighter budgets. It's essential to strip away complexity, enabling these creators to concentrate on their core talent: storytelling through film and television.

However, the task is daunting. The recent global landscape has been marked by unprecedented volatility, including the COVID-19 pandemic, an unstable geopolitical environment, wars within Europe, and energy crises. These challenges underscore the need for tools and processes that foster resilience and adaptability in businesses, especially in the creative sector.

The industry's broader requirement is to establish a stable, foundational operational base that safeguards the essence of creativity. It's about ensuring that the ability to narrate impactful and meaningful stories isn't overwhelmed by complexity and uncertainty. We aim to help bolster the endurance of film and television production companies, helping them navigate and thrive amidst these tumultuous times. 

The need for protecting individual privacy
Knowing that ones’ personal data is safeguarded, not monetised or sold, and not used to manipulate and target individuals is a basic human right. However, there are many examples of how personal data is used to profile, track and influence individuals to win elections, change opinions and manipulate behaviour. This doubles down on the need for a safe, European alternative like ours that fundamentally places human rights over profit and respects core data privacy principles. 

The need for European alternatives
Compliance with EU rules and regulations is a cornerstone requirement for any company in Europe, not just for legal conformity but also for ethical reasons. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) regulation represent key frameworks within this context that Connie is integrating and complying with. However, we believe compliance extends beyond these broad regulations: It also encompasses the safeguarding of other individual rights, like ensuring fair compensation, equality of opportunity regardless of gender, nationality, or other individual characteristics and other important ethical aspects. 

The need to stay competitive
As the 2023 Industry Outlook points out (quote below), growth in media has been driven by non-EU players, and this poses an urgent need to continue to pursue ways to stay competitive and secure that innovations that can make our industry better positioned to compete is homegrown. 

“An early adoption and usage of new technologies is key for European Film and Media companies. Thus far, growth in media has been driven by non-EU players, but European media companies are now looking to take advantage of recent and disruptive technological advances across the value chain, which may include innovative e-signature, authentication and identification solutions that comply with the EU’s GDPR regulations.”

But how does that actually play out in the everyday lives of a film production company, during the workday of a line producer, a production assistant or a company owner?

In practice

In the everyday life of many companies in the AV industry, this is is reflected in struggles to manage documents, contracts and agreements in an effective and compliant way. Our initial market research uncovered that contracts are still done on paper in half of the companies we talked to: Signed physically, scanned, passed around in unencrypted emails – and once signed, they are usually stored in either a physical storage with no security measures to protect access, or in a digital file storage solution that is likely hosted in a datacenter outside EU.

There are other real challenges too: Once a document is signed, the company needs to make sure that it gets renewed if necessary (e.g. a rights agreement or consent form), and they must comply with GDPR laws and have a diligent way to make sure personal data is either deleted in a timely manner, or stored for a good, lawful reason.

A small example of a recurring issue: Since the AV sector is comprised of mainly small enterprises, and is by nature project-oriented in its ways of working and organizing, freelancers and project-based hires is the norm. But what happens when, say, a freelance production manager is tasked with handling all the actor agreements, consent from extras, location agreements and other legal documents? Most times they manage this using their own computer / laptop, their own email, and (if contracts are handled on paper) store personal and confidential data, unsecured in their own home. Not only is this a risky way to manage contracts, as it can become really hard to locate them again in the future (likely, the freelancer has moved on, and forgot to file everything with the production company), but it also present severe data privacy issues that are in direct conflict with European legislative frameworks for managing personal data and sensitive information (e.g. GDPR).

Challenges like these are very real for film- and television production companies, yet cumbersome to handle without a digital, centralised, safe solution. Paper, email and Google Docs simply no longer suffices, and non-European tools pose substantial data privacy concerns.

The project (and action!)

With the Innovative Tools & Business Models grant, we can now work to enable all European film- and television production companies, big and small, to become more effective, streamline their document management – and in doing so, help elevate the level of transparency and privacy compliance across the sector. Our solution will help boost and secure our regions’ competitiveness. We actually believe, that if nothing is done, the AV industry will continue to compound “legal debt” due to lack of compliance and transparency and this will negatively impact the competitiveness of our entire industry if not mitigated or solved.

Our approach 

To actually begin delivering on our goals, we have defined three target groups for our efforts.

Film & Television Production companies

Obviously, we will begin reaching out and engaging with Film & Television Production companies. This will happen through content-driven communication and community building, through webinars and guides, and relevant newsletters. By producing, sharing and publishing quality content, we aim to build community and interest around our offering, and enable and empower these companies to improve their current processes and competitiveness. 

Although we initially focus our communication efforts on 12 EU countries, essentially any EU-based production company can sign up to our service, consume our materials, join our webinars etc. and we have created pricing tiers for our service that caters to different needs and company sizes.

If you come from a production company of any kind, and want to learn more, then please book some time with us here. 

Strategic Partnerships

We want to establish strategic partnerships with industry organisations, bodies and communities. As an example, this could be with Producers’ Associations, as they usually represent the interest of large groups of Production Companies and have a genuine interest in elevating competitiveness and compliance among their member base.

Practically, we will identify these "networks nodes” that represents the members' interests or exist to improve the working conditions across the industry. More often than not, these networks also offer legal guidance, provide templates or influence the conditions for workers and companies through their work: All areas where our platform can serve as an enabler between them and their members.

Through a partnership with us these organisations can offer a much more streamlined solution to their members, and provide a platform for their contracts and legal templates too, affording a one-source-of-truth for all their documents.

Finally it is through these organisations that we can truly achieve a harmonising effect on the industry, as this is the source of many, many legal templates.

If you represent a union, producers association, network organisation or a similar industry organisation, then please book some time with us here to discuss how we might collaborate. 

Educational Partnerships

We want to engage with every future film maker too. This is why educational institutions is a key part of our project. Through this grant we will start establishing collaborations and partnerships with film- and media schools throughout Europe. 

Young people at educations are open and eager to learn new tools and best practices, and they are digitally native, meaning that they simply jump right in and intuitively begin managing their document workflows digitally. As the future film makers they are, they also bring a fresh, non-biased perspective on how a platform like ours can improve usability and user friendliness and we will use that feedback to continuously improve our service. 

As students graduate and go out into the industry, they will likely begin working as freelance film makers, or be hired by a smaller film- or television production company, and they are likely to bring new best practices with them. 

If you are a teacher or a student who thinks your school should be using Connie, then ping us now, and we will tell you how easily you can get going (PS: Connie is free for educational use)

Next steps

As we are writing this, we are laying the foundations to start our work on this grant. We are hiring new talented people to join our team, we are detailing our project and communication plans and we are setting up the tools, templates and processes we need. It’s incredible to get to work on a project like this, improving the competitiveness of an industry we love and care about, and not least improve privacy and compliance along the way.

We will post a regular update on the progress and findings as we go along.

Stay tuned & don’t be a stranger.

PS: You can sign up for a 30-day free trial here – We really think you should take Connie for a spin.