from Screen Daily
www.screendaily.com

Slingshot, a new UK-based digital film production and distribution company, has announced plans to finance, produce and distribute a slate of 10 low-budget feature films over the next three years. Arvind Ethan David, Rachel Connors and Thomas Hoegh have founded the company, which will be based at Ealing Studios. David previously served as managing director at production company Ruby Films and also founded digital animation studio Hahabonk; Connors previously worked at Scorpio Films on films including Dear Frankie and also was an assistant agent at Artists Rights Group; Hoegh, who will serve as non-executive director of Slingshot, is chairman of Arts Alliance Productions and is on the board of LoveFilm and Arts Alliance Media.

Financing has been secured from media investors Arts Alliance Productions and the Creative Capital Fund. Slingshot said it will offer a profit-share production finance model allowing creative and technical professionals to get reduced fees but a percentage of producer’s gross participation.

Slingshot will majority finance the films, be shot and post-produced digitally, distributed through digital cinemas and video-on-demand, and marketed using the internet. “We will explicitly use the freedoms afforded by the digital revolution up and down the value chain to make better films and deliver them more efficiently,” David said in a statement. “We want to be creatively and commercially responsible for the films we make. We want to be held accountable for finding and serving the audience for our films. By producing and self distributing our films we are making that our challenge.”

Slingshot will shoot its first feature in late summer 2006 followed by the second project starting in autumn 2006. Collaborators on the initial slate include Ashclin Ditta, co-creator of The Catherine Tate Show, Vito Rocco, director of Suburban Shootout, and Russian Dolls producer Matthew Justice.

The initial slate includes crime drama and class study Collision, written by Dominic Leyton based on his play, directed by Gary Love based and co-produced by Justice and Oliver Milburn. Also on tap is family drama Faintheart, written by David Lemon and directed by Rocco, broken marriage comedy French Film, written by Ditta and directed by Jackie Oudney; and The Real Gavin Reed, a psychological thriller to mark the directorial debut of writer Adam Forgash.
 

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 20:02 and is filed under Blog, Slingshot Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.