2013 · multi-platform film-deadline calendar and networking tool · audiovisual industry service project
A cross-platform calendar service tracking film-industry deadlines, submissions, events, workflows, and partner coordination.
Servis-kalendar na više platformi koji prati rokove, prijave, događanja i suradnje europske filmske industrije.
This project credentials: Product & software development
This one was a tool, not a film, and I want to be plain about where it landed. We got the hard, boring parts right: a real co-production agreement with Cineuropa signed in Zagreb, a fully costed budget down to a seventy-five-euro margin, a three-phase financing plan, and a Creative Europe application with a letter of support behind it. The concept still holds up - meet people inside the calendars they already use instead of asking them to move.
What I cannot show you is the finish. I do not have a funding-decision document, and I do not have numbers proving the calendar shipped and got used at scale. The money never fully closed, and the archive stops before the launch window it was aiming at. I would rather say that clearly than dress up a plan as a result. What it proves is that we can structure a cross-border service business properly, on paper and with partners - and that building the vehicle and reaching the destination are two different jobs.
- Matija Radeljak
The European Film Calendar began in late 2013 as a fix for a dull, expensive problem: producers, directors and festival teams were tracking submission deadlines, financing calls and market dates across too many scattered channels, and losing opportunities to nothing more dramatic than bad bookkeeping. The concept, developed as an Aning Film-led phase between October 2013 and early 2014, was to build one deadline layer that lived in three places at once - a printed wall calendar, a web product, and mobile - while syncing into the calendar tools professionals already used. The bet was behavioural rather than technical. Rather than ask an entire industry to adopt a new habit, the tool would insert reliable dates into the routines people already kept.
By February 2014 the idea had hardened into a defined multi-platform package with a professional-service register rather than a consumer-app one - less a scheduler than a coordination surface for financing calls, festival submissions, workshops, markets and cross-border networking. The same month made the economics legible. The budget packet dated 17 February 2014 set projected costs at EUR 56,925 against a financing plan of EUR 57,000, a spread of seventy-five euros. An earlier draft had been framed in kuna at 202,950.00 HRK. The cost drivers were physical and operational: printing and distributing 2,000 copies of the wall calendar (EUR 26,000), wages and fees (EUR 14,500), and twelve months of web and mobile setup and administration (EUR 9,000). The near-zero headroom was the whole story - focus and fragility in one line.
The legal backbone was set in Zagreb on 1 April 2014, through a co-production agreement between Cineuropa and Aning Usluge d.o.o. It concentrated the financing plan and the Creative Europe / MEDIA application on the Cineuropa side, kept production and distribution execution with Aning Film, and fixed an 80/20 net-profit split for exploitation. Cineuropa put in EUR 6,000 of initial funding. Delivery, implementation and education were scheduled for October to November 2014.
How the team actually worked shows most clearly in its planning artifacts. A three-phase financing ladder mapped the money in sequence: early-bird partners first, an Indiegogo crowdfunding round second, and a Creative Europe / MEDIA grant third, with functional stretch goals attached to each tier. A Berlinale chalkboard photograph turned outreach into a scouting surface, listing institutions and companies to approach - HAVC, EAVE, Eurimages, IDFA, a free slot pencilled in for Sarajevo's CineLink, alongside distributors and sales agents. A June 2014 operating-plan reset then revised the descriptions, rebuilt the budget breakdown, and opened a web preproduction lane - a mid-course correction, not a stall.
What the archive does not contain is closure. There is a formal letter of support and a populated Creative Europe application, but no funding-decision document, and no post-launch adoption numbers after the planned late-2014 delivery window. So the honest reading is narrow and specific: what this project proves is development and co-production craft - a cross-border service business structured on paper with real partners, real governance and a fully costed financing model - rather than a shipped-and-measured product. It is the discipline of building the vehicle, documented in full, with the destination left open.
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