The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund is awarding £200,000 to Project Aperture, a collaboration led by CDN with BMT as supporting partner.
Looking to drive transformative change by helping to build a more inclusive film industry, Project Aperture aims to achieve this goal through the research and testing of a new system that efficiently collects and reports diversity data, addressing the challenge of collecting self-declared diversity data for the UK’s film production workforce.
The BFI funding will finance the two-year project, including prototyping the new system, designed to collect data, which is interoperable across existing film industry systems, whilst embedding advanced privacy measures to pave the way for secure reporting on the data.
To overcome the barriers that have prevented similar systems being successfully implemented in the past, CDN will be conducting significant consultation and user testing across the UK film industry. CDN has significant expertise in this area through creating the Diamond data collection system for the TV industry.
BMT’s contribution will facilitate the technical requirements of the project and is led by Emma Perry, Director of BMT, Ben Jefferson, Chief Technical Officer, David Lortal, Product Manager, Andy Wilson, Senior Software Engineer, Rowena Bartlett, UX/UI Designer.
“BAFTA Media Technology is very excited to be working with Creative Diversity Network on Aperture. The Aperture project aligns with BAFTA’s mission to develop best practice, driving the progress that is needed on accessibility, inclusion and sustainability in the screen arts,” said Perry.
Miranda Wayland, Chief Executive of CDN, commented: “Diamond was the world’s first diversity monitoring programme for the creative industries and has now become the benchmark tool for the UK’s main broadcasters to track their performance and adjust their strategies to ensure they are having the maximum impact. We are excited to be using our experience with Diamond to work with the BFI to develop a system which we hope will be equally impactful in the film production sector.”
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BMT (BAFTA Media Technology) is the software research and development arm of BAFTA (The British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and operates under an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified Information Security Management System.
