How to succeed in the private film and television industries? A production culture perspective.

The main objective of the project is to produce new knowledge about the production cultures of private film and TV companies that have proven sustainable over time and have created films and/or television programs that have become box office successes and/or have received critical acclaim. The project is a comparative study consisting of case studies of film and television companies in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Great Britain. The project also has a historical dimension that investigates the rise and fall of important film companies in Norway; a regional dimension focusing on the competitive advantages and disadvantages of being a film or television company situated outside the Norwegian captial; and a digital dimension concerned with the impact of digitalization on audiovisual production cultures in Norway.

In order to improve the competiveness of the private film and television industries in Norway and to increase our understanding of how this sector operates, this project investigates production cultures in private film and television companies. The main r esearch questions are as follows: What characterizes the production and marketing processes behind films and television programmes that can be described as successful in regard to critical acclaim or box-office results, or both? What innovative measures d o private film and television companies take to stay ahead of competitors? What are the most important drivers for achieving success in the private film and television sector, and what obstacles need to be overcome? This project focuses on the current sit uation in Norway, but in order to establish critical vantage points, the project includes both historical and cross-national comparative dimensions. The former examines what caused the growth and demise of prominent private film companies in Norway during selected historical periods. The latter is a study that investigates successful film and television companies in present-day Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK.