History

Wildscreen, whose headquarters are based in Bristol, UK, grew out of the success of the Wildscreen Film Festival which began in 1982. By the end of the 1970s, natural history filmmaking had existed as a genre for well over 25 years. It came to the notice of two key organizations that, whereas drama, light entertainment, documentary and the like could win awards, there was nothing to honor the increasingly spectacular wildlife productions, which is how and why the Wildscreen Festival was born. 

The BBC and Survival Anglia approached the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-UK) and the first Wildscreen Festival was born in 1982.  The founders were Chris Parsons, then head of the BBC Natural History Unit, and Sir Peter Scott (founder of WWF).

After its success in 1982, the festival continued until a charitable trust was formed to create the UK-based Wildscreen charity in December, 1987.

In the late 1980s, after seeing the large number of films being submitted to the Festival from around the world, Chris Parsons saw the need for a centralized library of wildlife films and photographs.  He envisioned this library to be accessible to everyone and preserved for future generations, in the same way that books are stored in the Library of Congress. But how could this vast array of material be stored, and how could it be accessed by people around the world? 

With the advent of the digital technology in the mid-1990s, Chris’s idea for a centralized media library, now named ARKive, could become a reality.  Now there was a means of preserving this material for future generations and, more importantly, disseminating it to everyone via the internet.  Hewlett Packard pledged to support the project by contributing in kind to its technological infrastructure, valued at $2M. In 2003, Sir David Attenborough launched ARKive to worldwide critical acclaim.  Over the years ARKive has grown from an idea to an extensive digital library of more than 6,500 film clips and over 50,000 images of threatened species. 

With this success, Wildscreen USA, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Washington DC was established to further build and disseminate ARKive in the US.