shortFLIX is a short film initiative for aspiring new filmmakers aged 18-25 not in full-time education, employment or training. The programme was designed to provide an opportunity for young, diverse, and underrepresented talent in the film industry. It gave participants the chance to develop their skills, gain professional experience, and secure a broadcast credit by creating short films aired on Sky Arts.
We interviewed Paul Ashton, Head of Film & TV at Creative UK, a not-for-profit organisation supporting the UK Creative Industries. We learn more about Paul’s personal EDI endeavours and delve deeper into the aims and successes of shortFLIX in placing young underrepresented and underprivileged people at the beginning of their careers in professional and commercial spaces.
Paul, what personally motivates you to address EDI in your work?
There are multiple reasons but I know what it’s like to feel outside and then manage to get inside but also still feel on the outside. I've always felt outside the cliques and like I don't quite fit in, which, as a white man, perhaps sounds overstated. However, being state-educated and from the north of England, there are certain things I see very clearly and feel very strongly, and so I understand those things better.
What change do you hope to achieve in the film & TV industry?
A multiplicity of voices is key. One of the things that is least addressed within the industry and has a massive impact is the London bias and socio-economics. We need to ensure that the industry is not overwhelmed by privately educated people. It needs to be more proportional than it has been and currently is. That’s something I personally feel very strongly about.
What do you see as the risk of not addressing the imbalance in diversity?
That the industry stagnates and stays the same. Similar voices multiply down the line and you get stagnation, and if content becomes stagnated, you lose audiences, which I think a lot of places are starting to feel the sharper end of now. If your audience is diverse, your content has to be diverse, so the voices making it have to be diverse too.
What were the main problems that shortFLIX aimed to address?
I think it has become very normal in the film & TV industry to fish in a very small number of overfished ponds, which are populated by people who know how to get into those ponds, not by people who don't know or don't have the opportunity to be found in them. So, it was partly to break that.
We also wanted to give opportunities to people who had literally never had one before - to people who could demonstrate to us that they had no networks, no contacts, no experience, etc. That was one of the defining factors of their ability to get into the programme.
We wanted to provide opportunities to work with a broadcaster in a real-world setting. It was a supportive environment but also very much real-world because that’s something people aren’t often properly prepared for. We took this approach because we wanted to give people confidence.
I think confidence is a really key thing for people coming from working-class backgrounds or more deprived socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s one of the biggest issues - not just their lack of confidence or desire to build it, but also the outrageous overconfidence they're faced with from people with privileged networks. They're not just fighting their own battle, but they’re also fighting against that, which is extraordinarily daunting.
We also wanted to see what stories people wanted to tell. People can get so led by what commissioners think they want or what PR want, for example, but we wanted to provide an environment where they could tell the story they actually wanted to tell.
What made shortFLIX different from other initiatives?
We don't really like doing development for the sake of development or training for the sake of training. We want it to really mean something. We wanted to give people real professional experience that gives them credit to go into any conversation and say “I have done this, I have made this, this is my work”. It wasn’t just about being hopeful, it was about having already bridged a big chasm for people in a safe, protected, supportive space within a commercial environment.
How did you reach your target groups and reach into the working-class community?
That was one of the biggest challenges. For the first round, we partnered with the National Youth Theatre to reach very grassroots people and organisations. What that did was help us find people who were proactive enough to go out and do something locally but perhaps hadn't necessarily progressed that any further.
We also did a lot of outreach through social media. However, social media means you’re relying on the fact people also have enough of an expressed interest to follow the right platforms that put this kind of information out there. It can be difficult to reach people who are not already a little bit proactive about a desire and instinct to join the industry. For the second round, we targeted people who already had that instinct through social media and that became our main call-out.
What part of shortFLIX do you feel was most impactful?
We had an initial cohort of around 25 people, and we did in-person workshops with them where we brought them all together, and they spent time as a group. They all had their own projects, so we put on general sessions and sessions related to the specific projects.
It was designed to be like a mini film school, which worked really well. We developed their confidence and storytelling skills alongside a lot of industry skills and training, practical things like working with HODs, crew and actors. We took all 25 people in the cohort to Sky HQ in Isleworth and chose five projects to greenlight in consultation with Sky Arts.
We then worked really closely with the five filmmakers whose projects we had chosen to take them through as much of a real-world process as possible, delivering something with a broadcaster on extremely low budgets. But the whole cohort was important. Some roles on the project crews were taken up by other people from the cohort who didn't get their project selected, so they also came away with credits of different kinds.
What do you think made shortFLIX so successful?
We had a team of people who did very different roles, but collectively, made people feel like they were in a safe place, even when challenging them. The team was super supportive but didn’t shy away from difficult decisions and feedback. It was important to us that we exposed the participants to real experiences so they could understand what working in film & TV is really like but in a way that made them feel supported and mentored.
We had the support of Carolina Giammetta, an award-winning writer/director who has been working in TV on productions including Vera, Doctors and Suspect. She was our creative director through the whole process and a large part of the programme’s success. She developed close relationships with the cohort and was able to support them, mentor them and give them practical advice on set.
We also brought in a producer towards the end of the round one training process called Loran Dunn. She came in to produce all five of the short films and helped make it all as smooth as possible. Jude Lister and the in-house team at Creative UK worked closely with the cohort to support them through the process.
What have been some of your measures of success?
We had set some EDI targets when we started out and we just blew them out of the water. Our applicant stats were really strong. I think what we realised was that if you build something targeted and it’s done in a positive, proactive way, you naturally improve your diversity. If you build something for particular people, they will come.
Then, in terms of the finished films, there were some really unusual stories in there, which were things that we hadn't seen before and told in ways we hadn't quite seen before. I just think, if you build it right, you will naturally get the diversity – you will get work that surprises you and stories that have a very strong sense of voice.
What have been some of the wider outcomes for the participants?
From round one, three of the five filmmakers that were selected went almost straight on to make new films. Some of the people who didn't get selected also went on and made their films in other ways and means and other people from the cohort have gone on to do other things like theatre as well. I think ShortFLIX gave them the impetus to say, “We can do it and we don’t need permission”.
Luna Carmoon made a new funded short and then got a feature film idea into development, Hoard, that premiered at Venice Film Festival in 2023 and went into cinemas in 2024. The speed of that turnaround to make a debut feature film funded by BFI and BBC is insane - it can easily take people who have been to a top film school 10 years to get to that point. Luna is exactly the kind of person—the kind of really distinctive voice—that the industry does sit up and take notice of.
What were the main challenges you faced?
Getting the money to do things properly. Even though we were working with a commercial broadcaster, their budgets were still understandably very challenging. Getting something like this up and running in the first place always takes a lot of time and effort. They don't always just come together easily.
What advice would you share with other organisations considering similar initiatives?
Be clear about what you want, who you are looking for, and how you want to work. Also, you have to understand what the drain on your organisation is going to be, whether that's financial, people or time - don’t say you can do things for free unless you've got funding from elsewhere that genuinely allows you to do that.
If you’ve been inspired by the shortFLIX story and would like to learn more, visit shortFLIX or see the films developed and produced by the programme on Sky Arts on Now TV.
