ABC Regional Production fund unearthing new programs

ABC Radio is on a mission to unearth regional Australia’s creative genius. Its Regional Production Fund is aimed at giving a voice to a wide cross section of artists and program makers who live and work outside capital cities.

Funding is available for individuals or community groups in regional Australia, as well as the smaller metropolitan centres of Hobart and Darwin and a number of projects have already been funded.

The Fund covers a wide scope of radio work which could include: documentary features or capsule series, music features, radio drama, comedy sketches, short stories or discussion programs.

The fund is also accepting expressions of interest from musicians in regional Australia to record or perform original material under existing projects.

Program ideas need to be suitable for broadcast on one of ABC’s five domestic radio networks – Local Radio, ABC Classic FM, ABC News Radio, Triple J and Radio National – and the ABC’s international network, Radio Australia.

Program content may also be used on “DiG”, the ABC’s internet-only radio station while project submissions with cross platform opportunities (for example; radio and on-line) are welcome.

Examples of projects commissioned so far include:

Highway One Revisited.

This is an oral history of Australia’s Highway One ,which was 25 yrs old in 2001. The story will be told by those people involved in the project, who conceived, built and now use the 15,000 km highway. The project will be in introduced by South Australian John Duncan, based in Clare, who will travel the Highway with laptop, digital camera and basic recording equipment.

Spotlight on Regional Recording Artists.

This project aims to provide regional musicians the opportunity to professionally record their items in regional studios, and be given airplay on ABC Local Radio, possibly other networks. The project will be coordinated by the ABC’s Richard Porteous, who will audition material from around the country and organise recording sessions with the artist in regional studios with producers and session musicians where necessary. The project will record 20 musicians before the end of June 2002.

Northern Perspective’s

This project was proposed by Suzanne Gibson who is a freelance broadcaster based in Cairns. It consists of three documentaries about issues in far north Queensland, including the political struggle surrounding the fight to save the Daintree Rainforest, the history and fate of the Tobacco growing industry, and the role of far north Queensland veterans in World War 11. The programs will be broadcast on Radio National’s Hindsight and in a shorter form on Cairns Local Radio.

The Way We Were

Historian and journalist Alex McRobbie is researching, compiling and narrating a series of 3-minute pieces to be run 5 times each week over 6 months, exploring the rich history of the Gold Coast. The series provides details on people, places, events and issues arising from one of Australia’s most popular locations.

Sunshine Coast Stories

A series of 6 X 3 minute mini-Australian Stories made as a Flash animation about unique Australian individuals from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The stories are recorded in Macromedia’s Flash format and are not only designed to work on radio and its Internet pages but, because Flash is a scalable vector animation package, the same Internet image can be rescaled from the Internet to television (16:9 broadcast resolution) with very little loss of quality. It’s radio with animated pictures made by award winning animator, Frank Gapinski and can be viewed at http://www.abc.net.au/sunshine

The criteria for interested regional producers is that you have some radio or media production, research and writing experience and therefore the capacity to bring the project to completion (with access to artists, technical production, production facilities and materials specified and costed on an application form).

Assistance is available on issues of production costings and, under limited circumstances, it may be possible to team your idea to experienced producers.

Information on how to apply is available through the ABC website at www.abc.net.au/radio or contact Phil Cullen at ABC Radio in Brisbane on 07 3377 5419 and fax 07 3377 5542 or [email protected] or Deborah Leavitt at ABC Radio in Perth 08 9 220 2781 or 0418 104 412, or [email protected]