Reflective Evaluation - Question 3 - Catherine Middleton

Question 3 : What kind of media institution might distribute our media product and why?


Distribution involves all the promotion and marketing of the film and getting your film out and seen by the public and critics. I first researched an independant film production company, as well as a major production company to give me some further information about the distribution of current media and how we could distribute our own film, taking into account that we are student filmmakers and not established producers with an open budget for our film.

It's a part of the Exclusive Media Group producing british horror films over the last 70 years.  Althougth they are based in the UK they have been one of the most successful independant production companies to promote and release their films worldwide, with the films being produced being from horror, sci-fi, thriller, film noir genres.  Recently they have procuded the remake of Let Me In and are currently promoting and releasing the film adaptation of the play The Woman In Black. Many of their productions are collaborations with other production companies and so are more successfully distributed and seen which seems to be paying off in financial return as the company are doing well after their 2007 revamp. They aim to produce 2-3 horror films a year so they are very specialised and i think that shows in their work.

I watched the trailer for The Woman In Black and looked into the promotion of the film. I noticed on the trailer that Hammer Films was not mentioned in the opening titles, instead CBS Films and Crosscreek Pictures so its quite a collaborative project for each department of the production allowing the budget to be higher and the breath of distribution to be wider and promotion to be more successful.

Stills from the trailer - 

     

I also looked at another independant production company - Vertigo Films, another UK based production company that aims to "create and distribute commercially driven independent cinema". they were only founded in 2002, but have recently collaborated with Hammer films on a joint production on horror film Wakewood, recieved very well by critics. Vertigo however is not as exclusive in the genre of films they produce, although they have produced thrillers and horrors like The Children, London to Brighton, and the low budget, award winning film Monsters.

Vertigo seem more globalised than Hammer, but are less direct and specific over what they produce - producing a wider range of films makes it easier to become established however, Hammer is well established becasue of what it makes and it being purely that genre.So the collaboration of Hammers knowledge of horror films and Vertigo's distribution skills work very well for films like Wake Wood.

    

Mirimax however is universally known, global company that is much broader again in the films they produce. The fact they are known so well and collaborate with other well known, hugely successful companies worldwide make they both financially and commercially very successful. They have the money and facilities/links to distribute films. They are a media institution that helps produce both films that are very critically aclaimed and others that are purely very popular with audiences worldwide. They have partnerships with Lionsgate and Studiocanal and also Netflix and Facebook so are able to reach a very broad range of people to advertise and promote films worldwide. Again unlike Hammer, the films they produce are not from a single genre but are extremely broad.

After looking at media institutions i think our film would most likely be distributed by a company like Hammer as althought they are not a huge, global company, they are very experienced with this particular genre of film and so i think they would be able to work well with our film and distribute our film successfully. They often work with low budget films and i think this would work well in our case also. They use partnerships to their advantage and their distribution and promotion is very effective in bringing in audiences and getting the film seen as they target the most influencial audiences and countries - i.e UK and USA being very powerful in the worldwide film industry. 

Whilst thinking about distribution and media institutions, we thought about our poster and what we wanted it to look like. We looked at other horror posters that had really grabbed our attention and analysed them to see how they had done so and influences they had on our expectations for the film and how much information they gave about plot, characters, is there a clear genre? etc.

I looked at some of the posters from films produced by some of the companies id researched. For example, the poster for Hammer's Let Me In really caught my attention...

Let Me In -

I found this poster really stiking - the positioning and body language of the girl is instantly eyecatching. I think the fact theyve chosen to position her adjacent to the title and credits is really interesting, its quite unexpected. There are a lot of typical horror elements in this poster so the genre is clearly well established - i.e. the blood round her mouth, the hood up, dark eyes, hand curled on the window - it makes a really creepy image and sets that as the tone for the film really well.I think the use of a white background works well as white is often symbolic for innoncent as are children, but here we are seeing the opposite - the white is juxtapositioned against the girl and the blood. The red lettering of the title makes it bold and contrasts against the white and also again has that connotation of blood/anger and danger. I think perhaps a more interesting font could make the poster stand out even more.

The Woman In Black -

 This is the latest poster from Hammer, advertising The Woman In Black, a ghost/psychological horror currently being advertised adn shown in cinemas. I think the smudges font of the title lettering works really well with staying inkeeping to the subgenre, aswell as the split of the image between the characters face and the shadow of the ghost. The very strong lighting creating shadows all over his face and background make it very unnerving and add to the expectations it makes for the film being very jumpy and scary. I think having a very character based poster works well and would be appropriate for our own films poster.

Our sample poster -

Ater researching a lot of horror film posters, we decided that we didnt want ours to be character based despite psychological horrors being very character driven. Instead we decided on a very simple but memorable image - we found and downloaded a typewriter font and using photoshop put together a poster using stained paper as the background (possibly symbolising a long standing threat and a history behond it) with splashes of both ink and blood which links in well with both our plot (the character being a novelist) and the tagline of the film, as well as immediately showing potential audiences that it is a horror film (i.e. by the blood). We added a release date, our production company name and the certificate of the film. We're we a large multinational production company, this poster would be shown worldwide on bilboards, buses, newspapers, magazines, etc. but as we are much lower budget and its a short student film, more likely ways of marketing would be facebook, or handouts/flyers, or via our blog etc.


Other Ways of Distribution-


The above distributors and companies are already very established, and considering that we are making such a  low budget student film, these would not be realistic distribution and production backing options for us. Instead i looked into other ways of getting films seen that were more appropriate for us. Many were options used by new/upcoming filmmakers and student projects/ low budget shoots. For example, film festivals are really successful in helping smaller films get seen. British Student Film Festival is a very popular national festival, specifically for student films. A more local film festival that is purely for horror films is Mayhem Festival, at the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham. Although film festivals are very useful in getting films seen, youtube and social networking sites are also really popular in sharing, for example, uploading trailers and short films onto myspace or own blogs. These options are much more accessible for us and so would be good choices for our own distribution.


Bang Film Festival is another local festival that would be a good choice for us to distribute our film and get it seen as well as putting it online for a more global audience. Its a good festival for smaller films and especially student films which would otherwise not be seen by as broad an audience. 

Release Diary -

The release date of a film is really important in securing financial return on the film and a good audience - for example, halloween is a good time for horrors to be released, as people are in teh mood to be scared, but i didnt want to chose a date where a very popular franchise film is beig released from a similar genre as it limits audiences. Therefore i think early November would be a good release date -just after halloween but not the busy summer blockbuster period or start of oscar season. DVD release date is usually around 4 months after the cinema release, so dvd release would be in March.

Cinema Release Date - Friday 9th November 2012
DVD Release Date -  Monday 11th March 2013


Advertisement Campaign -
I think our trailer would appear before films from similar genres, other horror films or perhaps action or thrillers. However, it would have to appear before films with the same certificate so that the trailer is appropriate for the audience.




Logo - 

 

Above is our designed logo for our production company; JEC. We used a very similar look to that of our poster (created in the same way using Photoshop) but as it was a company that could potentially create multiple films we didnt use the ink or blood as that was only relevant to that particular film. When looking at other production companies logos, theyre very simple....

So we therefore kept ours very simple - with a relatively plain background and simple text which i think worked really well. We put it as the opening image for our film to inform the audience of the company behind the production.