Sky Arts Futures Fund

LANGUAGE TRANSCRIPTION


[Music]

Jo Fox: The Sky Arts Ignition: Futures Fund is giving five young artists the chance to have a £30,000 bursary, as well as mentoring support from Sky to help them make the transition from school or college, into a working artist.
So, what we've been doing is going across the UK and Ireland to feed back to arts organisations and young artists about exactly what it is that we're looking for, you know, what makes their application so Sky Arts.

Unidentified Male Speaker 1: I think the Sky Arts programme is a great thing. It's giving people who may have never had the opportunity to earn the money to forward advance their career.

Unidentified Female Speaker 1: To have somebody like Sky to come in with their expertise, it's different, and it's what's really needed at the moment.

Jo Fox: What it means with the Sky Arts Ignition: Futures Fund, it's not just about the £30,000 bursary for their project and to help them over the year. It's really about the help that Sky Arts can bring them through our mentoring. We have eight directors who are giving group mentoring, and then we'll match them with an individual mentor for the life of their project.

Unidentified Female Speaker 2: Of course, you need that financial backing, but it's the learning that occurs in the mentorship, and the contacts that you'll make that will not make it a single project; it will extend beyond that, and it will be the springboard for your career.

Unidentified Female Speaker 3: It's just a hugely exciting opportunity for people who are in their 20s to make a work that they really, really want to make.

Unidentified Male Speaker 2: It's really, really exciting, it's kind of… there's nothing else like this out there. It's really kind of a cool idea. It's great fun. I suppose I'm kind of excited about it.

CAPTION: Futures Fund Ambassadors

Stuart Murdoch: If you're going to get into this business, whatever it is, visual art or making videos or dance or something like that, it's not a usual job. If you find one road is blocked there, then go over there, you know, try something new.

Unidentified Male Speaker 3: What is the one thing – if there is one thing – that you would say to the people here this afternoon, and to the people contemplating, sort of, applying for this?

Rupert Goold: I think having been, well, as you know, on the judging side, I think the ability to be succinct and pitch in three sentences is kind of useful.

Camille O'Sullivan: And I do this all the time; I go, by December 25th, I'm going to do a show here, and on… and this is what I'm going to do. So I will set a date, and then I get all my friends to bully me, to go, do you remember that date you set?

Freya Murray: Sometimes in the portfolio, people would be, as you would say, you know, we're a singer; we're a performer, or I'm an actor, for example, yet there would be no videos of their work at all. So we couldn't actually see it. And as I say, if it's music, we want to hear it. And if it's a performance, we want to see it.

CAPTION: How will Sky Arts Ignition: Futures Fund take your career to the next level?

Daisy Evans: Found out like a week ago that I had won the Sky Arts Futures Fund, and so I've won £30,000 worth of funding and mentoring. Sky Arts have given me the opportunity and the resource to make it happen. So, that's a really exciting point to be in one's young career.

Phoebe Boswell: So excited to kind of see where it goes next year, and where I am at this time next year with that help. It's too much.

CAPTION: sky.com/skyartsignition