Support us
Find your department, and help where you actually are.
Training places are funded by the surplus on commercial work and by people who put in money, equipment, stock, facility time, expertise or a place on a call sheet. The useful question is not how much — it is where in the pipeline you sit.
Futures in Film is a community interest company with an asset lock, not a registered charity. Every asset and every surplus is committed to community benefit. Gift Aid, payroll giving and Give As You Earn do not apply.
Start here
Buying is stronger than giving.
If you need social value you can evidence, commissioning work from us is worth more to both of us than a donation. Any surplus is locked in, so the money reaches the same place — and you get a delivery record, a method statement and a named partner in your bid instead of a receipt.
Give where there is nothing to buy. That is a real category, and most of this page is about it.
Across the pipeline
Where you sit, and what is genuinely useful from there.
Everyone reads a support page looking for the bit that applies to them. This is that list. Each row is something we have actually needed in the last year, not a wish.
| If you are | What helps most | What it makes possible |
|---|---|---|
| A manufacturer or technology company | Equipment access for an agreed period, consumables, or a product for a test day. | Current kit in trainees’ hands, and a structured report back to your engineers. |
| A rental house or facility | Sub-hire terms, prep bay time, or kit between contracts. | Training that runs on equipment currently in service rather than equipment retired into a classroom. |
| A studio, stage or venue | Space: a stage day, a workshop, a room, a screening theatre, a hub. | A production simulation that finishes on a real stage instead of in a seminar room. |
| A production company or broadcaster | A defined, supervised, paid position on a unit — in any department. | The third credit, which is where people actually fall out of this industry. |
| A post house, VFX or animation studio | Suite time, a supervised assistant position, or somebody to teach a day. | The part of the pipeline our own pool is thinnest in, and we say so on the page. |
| A film laboratory or stock supplier | Short ends, stock, processing or scanning time. | Film handling taught with real negative and a real lab at the end. It cannot be taught any other way. |
| A working practitioner, at any grade | A day teaching, a mentoring relationship, or a name on a recommendation. | The thing money cannot buy and the reason people trust the training. |
| A trust, foundation or public funder | Funded places, access costs, or core capacity. | Places for people who cannot self-fund, and the staff time to follow them up properly. |
| A business with no screen connection at all | Funding a named place, or access costs for a named participant. | One person who could not otherwise have taken the place. |
Ways in
Money, equipment, time, or a place on a call sheet.
Fund a place
One person, one programme, named and costed. You are told what it paid for and what happened to the person, within the limits of what they are willing to have shared.
Fund access
Travel, accommodation or equipment for a named participant who could not otherwise take up a place. Where you live should not decide whether you can train.
Give equipment, stock or facility time
Donated equipment is held by Futures in Film CIC, insured and maintained by it, and used for training and on work connected to training. Title stays with the CIC; nothing donated passes to another company in the ecosystem. We only take what we can hold, insure, store and maintain.
Give a place on a production
A defined role on your unit, for defined dates, for somebody who has held the grade on a production simulation. Paid, supervised, and debriefed afterwards.
Mentor, or teach a day
A named working practitioner matched to somebody trying to take a specific next step. Or a single day in front of a cohort in your own department. Both are finite, both are useful, and neither requires you to become a trustee of anything.
Open a door in your region
A venue, a community connection, a local authority contact, or a cohort. The work started in the North West and travels; the limit is usually a room and somebody local who is trusted.
Festival crane rig on a tracking vehicle, LED wall behind
Where it lands
Support goes to a place, not to a department budget.
We do not run an unrestricted pot. Support is tied to a place, a participant, a piece of equipment or a block of delivery, and reported back against that. If what you want to fund is not something we do, we will say so rather than take it and reshape it afterwards.
Stated up front
What support does not buy.
- A gift funds a place. It does not buy influence over who we take or what we teach
- No organisation is described as a partner, a sponsor or a supporter unless the wording has been agreed in writing
- Equipment is taken only where the CIC can hold, insure, store and maintain it
- We are not a registered charity: Gift Aid, payroll giving and Give As You Earn do not apply
Next
Tell us which row you are.
A sentence about where you sit and what you could offer is enough to start. We will tell you honestly whether it helps.
