Helen is one of the five founding partners of Matchbox Pictures, an Australian film and television production company. She is the lead producer on The Slap, an eight-part drama based on the novel by Christos Tsiolkas, which screened on ABC1 and BBC4.

 Helen has produced three feature films as well as numerous documentaries. Her first feature Soft Fruit, screened in Critics’ Week in Cannes in 2000, won the Critics’ Prize at San Sebastian and was selected for Sundance in 2000. In 2002 she produced Travelling Light and in 2009 she produced Lou (starring John Hurt and Emily Barclay) with Tony Ayres and Michael McMahon. Her 2006 documentary Girl in a Mirror was the first Australian film ever to win the prestigious Rose D’or Award in Montreux as well as winning many other documentary prizes.

 Helen is currently producing Underground, a telemovie about the early life of Julian Assange, written and directed by Robert Connolly.

Sherman and Canning were the recipients of the Darryl F. Zanuck Producer of the Year Award at the 2011 Producer Guild of America Awards. 

See-Saw’s latest feature, Shame starring Carey Mulligan and Michael Fassbender and directed by British filmmaker/artist Steve McQueen was released in 2011. 

Soon after inception, See-Saw founded finance company Fulcrum Media Finance together with Sharon Menzies and Barry Sechos. Fulcrum provides finance to cashflow the Australian Producer Offset, the New Zealand Screen Production Incentive Fund (SPIF) and the UK tax credit, as well as providing gap finance and cashflowing presales. Fulcrum has provided finance to over 20 films and is backed by Media Super, a large Australian pension fund. 

Through his previous company, Sherman Pictures, Sherman produced films including the Toronto International Film Festival FIPRESCI awarded film Disgrace starring John Malkovich and based on Nobel Prize winning author J.M.Coetzee’s novel; the Annie Award Best Film nominated stop motion animation feature $9.99; and award-winning films Candy starring Heath Ledger and Geoffrey Rush, and Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (as EP). Emile was the recipient of the Screen Producers Association Of Australia 2009  Independent Producer of the Year Award.

 Sherman is also a director of leading Australasian distribution company Transmission Films, which has a joint venture with Paramount Pictures.

Sherman is a director of Australia’s leading independent film school, Sydney Film School, as well as non-profit organisation Voiceless, the animal protection institute.

Robert Connolly thinks so. In his white paper Embracing Innovation: a new methodology for feature film production in Australia, Robert offers a 10-step plan for reducing production costs. Proposed measures include:

- a first dollar share for filmmakers
- fair returns for cast and crew
- more realistic budget models
- simplified reporting obligations

Many of these measures will be controversial. All of them are worth debating.

• Monologue to dialogue
• Audience as creators
• Building audiences
• Multiple revenue streams
• A new business model
• Abundance of broadband
• It’s all about the story

• What is transmedia?
• Interactivity and talking back
• Engaging the audience
• Authorship will be many-stranded
• Content plus context
• User-generated content
• Generation C
• Brands as clues
• Social influencers
• Find Filter Forward
• Virtual currencies
• Multiple revenue streams
• Funding transmedia
• Crowdfunding
• A different mind think
• Creativity makes everything work
• Fail fast

• The power of a distributor
• The value of a distributor
• The money trail
• Minimising the downside
• It’s not a business for the fait hearted
• Instinct plus rationale
• Windows are collapsing
• Increase in online distribution
• Always a place for exhibition
• You need a passion for the industry
• A crazy sexy business

• Serving the audience
• Financing screen content
• Committees stifle innovation
• More effective government support
• Putting the money on the screen
• Failure is essential
• An exciting new world

Yet for many in the film and television industries, the digital world remains a scary and difficult place. Business models are unclear, the audience is fragmented and the distribution models are too complex, too open or both. Additionally, the digital world has its own unique terms, unfamiliar or even puzzling to film and TV producers.

Education is the key to resolving these uncertainties. In particular, producers need to understand three key concepts:

1. how to distribute content in the digital space,
2. how to create an audience for this content and
3. how to generate a return from it.

Written by digital media expert Jennifer Wilson, this helpful guide is designed to assist both new and established screen content producers in getting to grips with online distribution, audience dynamics and monetisation.

This paper has been jointly supported by Screenrights and AFTRS, and is a companion piece to Jennifer’s paper The digital deadlock: How clearance and copyright issues are keeping Australian content offline.