Creative Industries
Bristol and Bath combine their distinctive offers to provide one of the pre-eminent European centres of creative and cultural industry and talent with a growing global profile. Home to the multiple Oscar-winning Aardman Animations, creators of the world famous characters Wallace and Gromit, as well as the BBC Natural History Unit, Granada Wild, Endemol West and many other independent film and production companies, Bristol enjoys close economic and cultural links to London and emerged in recent years as the UK's second Media city - the driving force of a richly creative region with an estimated 1 billion GBP annual media output. In 2006 the inward investment to the Bristol city-region from externally based film companies amounted to some 23 million GBP.
Bristol is the world capital of the wildlife and environmental film industry - responsible for 25% of this sector's global output, hosting of the international Wildscreen Film Festival annually, and employment of around 1,500 people. Another leading event is the Encounters festival of short films held annually at the Watershed, the UK's first and most highly regarded media centre. Popular British television drama series such as Casualty, Teachers, Deal or No Deal and Celebrity Big Brother are filmed or produced in the city.
Apart from its film, broadcast and digital media companies, the city region is justly famous for its varied and vibrant music scene - from the Bath Philharmonia and Bristol Bach Choir to the more subterranean Bristol Sound in the form of Portishead, Roni Size and Massive Attack. Bristol and Bath also boast a strength in other creative sectors unmatched by most other European regional cities - design and architecture, books and publishing, visual arts, theatre and performing arts, including a profusion of festivals and carnivals throughout the year, dance venues, comedy clubs, cabaret, street theatre and Europe's leading circus school.
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