Future of Film Podcast · 3.10 Can Tech Startups Save the Film Industry?

"We found that the Artificial Intelligence was favouring the smaller projects over the bigger ones." Nadira Azermai

Can tech save the film industry? That's the question posed to three tech founders in this special episode of Film Disruptors, recorded live at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. Nadira Azermai of Scriptbook, Maria Tanjala of Film Chain and usheru's Catherine Downes discuss their growing businesses and how they are bringing innovative solutions to film development, finance and distribution.

This episode was produced during the 21st edition of the FilmTech Meetup Berlin, in collaboration with Filmtech Office www.filmtechoffice.com

and EFM Horizon www.efm-berlinale.de/en/horizon/home/horizon, the European Film Market's platform focusing on the future of film business and new developments in the media and entertainment worlds

About Nadira Azermai, Maria Tanjala and Catherine Downes

Nadira Azermai

Nadira Azermai is Founder of ScriptBook, a high-tech company that provides artificially intelligent screenplay analysis and box office forecasts. ScriptBook was conceived when Nadira wrote her Master’s thesis on using artificial intelligence to quantify story-parameters into a predictive model. This would enable content creators to assess their projects objectively and avoid financial failure. Nadira has been on a mission to unify art & artificial intelligence ever since.

Maria Tanjala

Maria's background is in film production, from line producing, budgeting to distribution. She is passionate about tech solutions that bring transparency and automation in the creative industries, creating a level playing field for creators and enterprises.

Maria Tanjala founded alongside Irina Albita the FilmChain platform that collects, allocates and analyses revenues for film, TV and digital content on the blockchain, replacing the traditional collection services with transparent, real-time payments from viewers to filmmakers. In 2020 they won "Startup of the Year" at London Business Awards by Mayor of London.

Catherine Downes

Catherine is COO & CMO - usheru, the tech analytics company that specialises in film marketing.

Catherine studied her undergraduate degree at Trinity in Business Studies and Political Science and holds a Masters in Human Rights and Criminology Justice from Queen’s University Belfast. After several years working in research in this area, she made a switch into the world of technology by joining Google in January 2008 and spent almost 7 years there, across different product groups. Her roles focused mainly on marketing, and sales partnerships. Her final role at Google saw her lead the global Google Certified Publishing Partner program which she worked on since inception and grew for almost 2 years across Europe and Asia, launching the first US partners before leaving to start usheru.

Catherine co-founded usheru 5 years ago with Ollie Fegan and Andres Macias with the ultimate goal to connect film marketing to the box office, and to provide consumer insight for film distributors. Venture-backed usheru currently operates across Europe, with technology products for film distributors, national film bodies and cinemas - the company is eyeing a 2020 expansion into the US.

Catherine speaks French, Spanish and Italian, and in a former life was even a snowboard instructor in Canada and an avid cycling road racer.