Task 8: Other considerations for businesses

You may find a lot of information for some of the sections below. If so, tighten your search to focus mainly on the sector / career you are interested in.

Finance - what sources of funding exist within the creative industries?

The main sources for financing within the creative industries can be through; art councils, the National Lottery (distributors such as the BFI distributes the fundings from the lottery and is also on of the leading bodies for movies within the United Kingdom), foundations, education, business loans, foreign funding from areas such as Europe and fundraising, where it can be raised from the help of companies such as the British council to independent online sourcing from well known and successful websites such as Kickstarter or GoFundMe.

Insurance - what types of insurance exist for the creative industries?

The types of insurances found within the creative industries are; professional indemnity insurance, which protects any creative employee from any fowl play such as plagiarising an logo to lacking the work put into a commissioned project as a few examples, employers liability, where any employee are legally required when taking up a job within a creative area, no matter the type of contract you may have, public liability, meaning it covers any damage or injury to a third party if the cause was created by an employer, tax and legal expenses, which takes care of representation costs whenever there's any disputes and business equipment, where it covers any important and expensive equipment like pc computers or furniture. These are all important as it covers most areas which are essential for an creative job environment.

Working from home - what are the considerations?

For working at home, the considerations is that especially in a creative job is the technology and for how powerful it is as for example if you were to do an animation on a small laptop at home, it would be difficult to complete the tasks needed due to the size of the laptop and possibly the amount of storage and memory could effect the programs' input. Distractions could also be a common occurrence as anything surrounding your work area could become a distraction which would lead to no work getting done. Broadband and internet can also be possible risk as for example if you were in an online meeting, there's a small chance it may disconnect during the meeting which would lead to you as an employee to miss crucial information for your work. There is also areas about tax relief on how if you decide to work from home, it is most likely that you cannot claim the tax relief but there's a possible chance you could claim it for areas such as gas and electricity, business related calls and metered water but it has to basically relate heavily to your work.

Business rates - what are they?

The business rates, especially for animation related jobs within the United Kingdom, the most popular and grossing sector are VFX (Visual Effects) as investment from other countries with big contributors such as the United States, earn around more than £1 billion (with Gross Value Added). With freelancing animation, it is suggested that earnings can be around £400 daily due to having double the work rate while animation company working employee can earn around half of the recommended freelancer earning rate, sometimes the payment can be charged per project, hourly or daily and especially with client based worked, the budget given by the client could alter the amount you earn due to limitations of the budget and it also also change based around the project (example; smaller payment for looping GIFs to higher payments on advertisements or music videos). 

Geography, transport and accessibility - does it matter where a company / organisation is based?

For geography, transport and accessibility, I think it does matter for where a company/organisation is based as for example for an animation or just any creative related job, they are more widely available in cities due to being more populated and higher interest within that industry in those areas, infrastructure can also be. Luckily with most cities, they have multiple transport options to get within the city such as trains, buses and taxis, you can also drive down to the city by your own car but however the downside could be that the area that you are located in might not have as many accessible types of transport (this could mean buses might not go through the area as an example) and it could only be transported by car travel but if you don't have a drivers license or car, then this can limit your options for an creative jobs, so in areas such as villages to towns, the likelihood of finding animation jobs in those areas are unlikely and would probably be freelance at most. Within the UK, there are a variety of animation jobs which revolve mostly around television animation/2D animation, with most being in London as it's the capital of the country and it's infrastructure being massive in comparison on different areas within UK however outside of the country, the variety of animation jobs have been increased as the powerhouse for animation jobs are found within the United States as major studios like Disney and Pixar both originate and produce content over there and their studios expand into different states, creating more jobs opportunities. 

Does distance matter?

Distance does but also doesn't matter, as like mentioned before, for especially the area I would like to focus more in as a job, animation can be found throughout the United Kingdom but can be sparse depending in the area you live it but if you wanted to get a high end job like in Disney for example, distance would be key to getting that as you would have to travel to a different country (which would be the United States) in order to pursue that goal. However, if you wanted something smaller and more independent for what they produce, a local city might be more fitting as cities can be hotspots for more creative opportunities, also making it less of a treck distance wise.