Film Distribution.

The role of the distributor is to identify and deliver the largest possible audience for every film. It is their job to promote the film in order that the audience know what film they want to go and see, before they reach the cinema. The promotions they use must be specific to the film they are promoting, based on the genre and target audience.

Film distributors do not only work on promoting the film is the cinema, their job continues when the film is ready for the home entertainment sector, pay/subscription or finally free-to-air television.

Several things distributors consider when promoting a film;-

·         Who is the film for?

·         Who can be convinced to buy a cinema ticket?

·         Why should they do so?

·         What sort of audiences have similar films attracted recently?

Things to consider when deciding on the audience;-

·         Age Group

·         Gender

·         Lifestyles

·         Social Networks

·         Media consumption patterns


This can prove to be a very large part of the work which companies must consider when working with a brand and can influence the different methods of distribution they use, as different people will be affected by different types of media more heavily, e.g. young people may tend to be more affected by advertising on the internet, while older people may be more affected by TV advertising.

Most frequent cinema goers are:-

·         Teenagers

·         Students

·         Young Adults

Things to consider when releasing a film;-

·         Is there is any strong competition for the movie?

·         Is it an event film or a specialised film?

·         Does it have star power? (famous actors)

·         Has it been made by a famous director?

·         Are there any cast members available for publicity?

·         Is it a film for a holiday period?

·         Does the film have a chance of getting any awards?

·         Will the film lead that week’s media reviews of current releases?

·         Is there a positive buzz about the film’s release?

·         Is it part of a series of films or part of a franchise?

·         Has the film already been released in other countries?

·         What age certificate will it have?

One of the major parts of film distribution is the creation of the trailer. Trailers are considered the most cost effective method of advertising a film. It is important which film is chosen to advertise the trailers upon.

The internet is an important place to advertise films. Users can review and have and share opinions on the films, and the trailers they have seen.

Merchandising

·         Official soundtracks

·         Video Games

·         Books

·         Franchising

·         Images

·         Action figures

·         Ring tones

·         Clothing

·         Screen savers

·         Calendars


Merchandise is becoming a larger and larger part of the film business, with a large amount of revenue coming from franchising merchandise to separate companies such as Mac Donald's, with their Happy Meal Toys, as well as toy companies who produce action figures.

Teaser trailers and normal trailers.

There are many differences between a teaser trailer and a normal trailer. First and most noticably is the length,  a teaser trailer can be as short as 10 seconds, and relseases just a few seconds of footage from the movie, this is incredibly short compared to a full length trailer which could be up to two and a half minutes long and show a indepth look at the story. This increase in length generates the interest in a different way to teaser trailers, while teaser trailers still aim to create exciment within an audience they aim to show as little as possible to really leave the audience wanting more, while a normal trailer is more like a preview of the film.



An example of a very short teaser trailer. Aiming to 'wow' the audience in as small time as possible. This time of trailer is useful within advertising because it can fit into small slots, such as in ad breaks on television.

Ancillary task original photographs.

An example of one of our shooting scheduals. These helped us to plan when and where we were filming.

Audience Research results.

In order to find out what type of horror people liked we carried out a survey in the form of a questionnaire.
The questionnaire asked questions such as favourite horror genre, their personal favourite horror film and why they like it, their favourite horror villain and why, also also about their fears and phobias. We also asked about what they look for in a horror trailer and why this would make them want to see a movie because of it.
The final part of the questionnaire asked about the audiences viewing habits and who they tend to go and see horror movies with.

The results of the questionnaire suggested that there was a large majority of males within the audience who tended to go and see horror movies with a boyfriend/girlfriend or with a group of friends. There were very few girls which went to go and see horror movies, and even less that would go on their own or with a group of girl friends.

Another trend within the results we found was the popularity of both psychological horror and gore fest horror. These seemed to be very popular within the audience we surveyed. This has helped us to decide the kind of horror movie we would like to try and produce a trailer for. Not much of our group like gore horrors so we think that we will make a psychological horror, aiming to create scenes of tension and scare the audiences with glimpses of the supernatural.

The survey we conducted did not give us a detailed view of the audience but definetly helped us to gain a rough glimpse at what type of horrors the audience like and will help us to perfectly cater the product to suit a as large audience as possible.

This issue of Empire has been specifically designed for the the relsease of Batman: The Dark Knight; you can see certain fonts have been used to recreate the style of a hostage note. The colours within the text also mimic the colour pallet of The Joker. I also think the picture is really well taken, I like how it seems to perfectly represent the character.

Representations of women within the horror genre.

HALLOWEEN (1978)

The first film I will be looking at is Halloween, made in 1978. Halloween is the mother of all modern slasher movies. The camera angles and shots from the POV of the monster are still being recreated today.

Within Halloween there is an equal gender mix, roughly 50/50 males and females. Halloween seems to abide to classic gender stereotypes of women in the way that Laurie (the main character) and other female characters are portrayed. Laurie is often portrayed in domestic and motherly roles, looking after children, washing clothes, being caring. These follow the stereotypical view of women and mothers which we all know. Despite this, Laurie differs from the other female characters within the film. Unlike Laurie whose character seems to be quite ‘mature’ other female characters are mischievous and seem to follow the stereotype of teenagers, drinking and having sex. The contrast between the two sets of characters is made quite clear by the almost over the top actions of Annie and Lynda. Although both Annie and Lynda also both carry out domestic duties, this is overshadowed by the way throughout the film they proceed to drink and be sexually promiscuous. Ultimately the film seems to condemn these characters to a brutal murder because of their behaviour which may suggest, the film is attempting to take a stand against this stereotype of teenage boys and girls. These acts of murder upon sexually promiscuous girls are started within the first scene of the movie. In this scene the camera in within the male gaze of a young Mike Myers in which he stalks his older sister who has just had sex with her boyfriend, he then proceeds to commit a bloody murder upon her. Throughout the film the camera returns to this Myers POV shot, and in the scene with Lynda objectifies her as she tries to be sexually provocative. It could be said that this is done specifically to target the male audience (the largest section of horror movie audiences), and the use of the male gaze helps to draw the male audience in.

 Men within Halloween are also portrayed in a very stereotypical manner. The two older male characters are doctors and sheriffs, both very cliché roles for a man. The younger man spends the whole film drinking and having sex, unsurprisingly he dies.

Halloween seems to have a mixed representation of gender, the differences between Laurie and the other clear due to Laurie being so metrosexual. The way she acts, the clothes she wears, her general refusal to join the other girls and her lack of interest in boys all create a massive contrast between the two sets of female characters. The amount of female deaths within Halloween outnumbers male ones by 2/3, and it seems these is more importance put upon the death of the female characters with the condemning of their sexual behaviour. Halloween seems to mostly follow gender stereotypes, with the exception of Laurie and her metrosexual personality.

Trailer

This is our finished trailer.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Hardware

In order to record a majority of my trailer footage I used a Sony mini camcorder, it is a fairly basic camcorder, which uses the old tape system. This tended to be a hindrance when filming as we had to make sure the tape was fully rewound and not overwriting any footage we already had. In the future I would hope that it is possible we could use more up to date recording equipment that records into a digital device. Despite being old, it done the job and had a useful flip screen which was nice for filming POV shots as you could see what you were recording. The manual focus also came in useful while filming and there are noticeable moments within our trailer where we have used it to give the effect a POV shot especially. Along with the camcorder I used a Digital SLR camera to take my photographs; the autofocus came in useful especially when I was taking the close up of the eye used in my film poster. For most of the production of our trailer we used an Apple iMac, I found these very easy to use and very quick compared to normal PC’s. They helped greatly in speeding up the production process.

Software

In the production of our trailer we used Final Cut Pro. Final Cut pro is a professional piece of software which is a market leader in video production. It allowed us to easily upload and edit our footage using a multitude of different options which allowed us to cut and join together various scenes using effects such as fades and transitional effects. I think our final trailer clearly shows the vast number of effects that are possible on final cut and these work very well with the style of trailer we were going for. If I had to criticise this piece of software on anything it would be the lack of options for text and inter-titles, the text options were often limited and clunky and because of this we used Adobe After Effects CS4 to create our inter-titles and then imported them in as video files. After Effects allowed for much more in depth options when it came to choosing effects for text along with movement and the actions which the text have. Our group had no training within the programme and we learned slowly how to construct the text and eventually completed a set of inter-titles which looked professional and much better than what could have been produced within Final Cut Pro. In order to create the music and sound effects for our trailer we used Cubase 5, within our group we had several people who had a lot of experience within this program which allowed us to create a soundtrack to a high quality with relative ease. One good thing about Cubase was the ability to import video footage into the program which allowed for us to perfectly match the soundtrack to what was happening within the trailer; this is why the music throughout the trailer seems to develop and change along with the various scenes within the trailer. Having members with experience in sound recording also allowed us to use professional recording equipment such as mics to import high quality audio into Cubase which can be seen in scenes such as the ending in which the whispers are heard.

 In the production of my ancillary products I used Adobe CS5. This recognisable piece of software is an industry standard piece of highly professional software which allows for high quality pieces of media to be produced. This is one program which I personally had a lot of experience in and was able to use to its full ability. Photoshop allowed me to easy edit the still images I took with the Digital SLR. I was able to easily change the levels on light and saturation to change a relatively normal photo into a dark and ‘scary’ looking photo, changing a normal girl into a frightful antagonist. It is also extremely useful for creating and arranging typography, due to the vast number of fonts available and the ability to easily change the size and spaces within text. Photoshop also has a useful ruler and snap system which allows for precise placement of images and text, this came in very useful in creating the perfectly lined up and placed images and text within both products.Photoshop

The Internet.

The internet played a massive role in researching previous horrors. I could browse websites like IMDB. These allowed me to experience a multitude of previous horror movies from throughout the ages and take the very best bits out of all of them and add them to my trailer. This access to pretty much every movie ever made is such a massive tool when attempting to come up with a concept for a movie, as a tool the internet is almost indispensable, it provides a source of information which has proved invaluable. In order to view the trailers of movies I found on IMDB I used Youtube, Using YouTube I was able to view high quality videos and easily generate ideas for my trailer, a large amount of our research came from YouTube and it played a massive role in dictating how our trailer was produced. In order to display my work throughout the project I have been using Blogger, having a blog allows you to combine almost every single type of media within one side website. I am able to post all my progress within our trailer and display images of things which have acted as inspiration along with trailers I have watched. Despite the seemingly perfect description the blog actually performs awfully, it is very to actually display and arranges text and images are they very clunky and difficult to arrange in a way that looks nice. I think that it may be that it is just the specific blogging site we are using which has these problems and a website with up to date publishing applications would probably work much better.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

In one specific class session we specificly viewed each other’s trailers in order to gain feedback from other members of the class. Through the use of the class feedback session I discovered lots of positive and negative aspects of our trailer. The feedback we acquired may be considered bias due to the demographic of our class being mainly teenage boys. Despite this the demographic of horror movies is prominently teenage boys the feedback should be appropriate.

Through this I have been able to accordingly change and modify the trailer in order to combat those negative parts. Having the audience feedback had a really noticeable effect on the trailer and has definitely made the trailer better as a result.

The first thing which became immediately obvious through the feedback was that people really liked our inter-titles,  they all thought that these were well made and suited the trailers colour scheme and general supernatural feel. However there was a minority which believed that while the effect was good and well made, it was too busy, and needed reducing so you can easily see what the text actually said. In responce to this we altered the titles so they had less effect on them.

Despite this they felt that we used the same inter-title style too much and that we should change the inter-titles which contained the names of the companies which produced the movie. We took this on board and spent a while designing custom titles for the specific companies.

The feedback we recieved was largely positive and this was something we were very pleased with. There were a few other small issues that people raised but these were easily editable without the ened to reshoot. The only major thing people seemed to have a problem with is the ongoing green filter placed over a large amount of the shots within the trailer. This is something we keenly debated within the group and decided that we should keep the effect, and sometimes taking a more original style and going against the horror conventions could work in our favour. By using the green filter we wanted to give the idea of a supernatural being stalking the protagonist, this effect also mimics the style of a nightvision camera which has been used in lots of horror movies such as Paranormal Activity. The classes critisisms came from the idea that the green filter was infact a convention of the sci-fi genre and was not appropriate, although we agreed with this, we felt that this did give us a sence of originality within our work and though this was actually beneficial.

A scene from Paranormal activity. With its noticable green filter.

Another thing which people seemed to enjoy was the gradual rise in tempo of our trailer. They enjoyed how it ended with faced pace POV scene and thought that this was a good way to end the trailer. They suggested in this scene that there should be whispering over the top of the shot, so it sounds like the antagonist is trying to scare the protagonist away. We thought this was a good idea and made an effort to implement them into the background.

We actually did two different sets of whispers and tested them both, eventually we did choose and found that they do add that bit extra that the final scene needed.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think that as a promotional package my trailer and ancillary tasks work really well together. In my poster I have tried to recreate scenes and use characters which the audience would be able to recognise, in an attempt to link all the products together. I think it appropriately advertises the film and could rally an audience in order for success as a theatrical release. 


By having a poster to accompany my trailer I can target a much larger audience due to the fact you can place a poster almost anywhere and it can be viewed by countless people, while a trailer can only be viewed through cinemas, the internet and through television. This means that the poster will play an absolutely vital role in advertising the trailer, acting almost as a lure to try and attract audiences. Hopefully after seeing the poster audiences would try to find out more about the movie, by searching for it online and viewing the trailer, or by buying the magazine to read more about it. The magazine plays a similar but smaller role to the poster and would be part of a much larger scheme to attempt to publicise the movie and reach the biggest demographic possible. 


By getting the movie into magazines such as Empire you can create hype about the product. If people start to see articles and posters about the movie in countless places it will start to create a fan base for the movie and should help to create a massive for the release.  In order for the advertising and publicity to link together I tried to create products which all link up together visually and have obvious link between them. One thing I did decide to carry on throughout my ancillary tasks was the green theme; this green style went against the general forms and conventions of horror as it is more often used as a colour within the sci-fi genre. I decided that in order to keep my products seem like they were linked and flow together nicely. Although the green theme goes against basic horror conventions I think that I would actually work in the favour of the movie by helping it stand out from other horrors, also having a green filter throughout the movie may also attract parts of the sci-fi target demographic that would see the movie as it looks appealing to them. Little things like this are all factors in attracting further potential customers. The idea behind my film poster was that it would be very crisp and clean and I think I have fulfilled that. 


One thing I found useful while creating the poster was the auto alignment feature on Photoshop. This allowed me to get all my different sections of text and image on the poster centred with each other and this contributed to that clean look that I feel I have achieved. I settled on the poster being very dark and having just the eye of the main antagonist in the centre. I think that just using the single eye works really well, it reminds me of the scene where the flashlight shines on the antagonists face. I think the use of black space within my poster and magazine cover helps increase the feeling of danger and isolation in an attempt to really involve some key horror.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   I chose to design my magazine cover as an Empire magazine, in order to make the masthead I took a copy of empires masthead and selected the area and filled it in myself, I then illustrated it so it had drips coming off it in order to suit the horror style. I took the main front cover image of my friend on a digital camera and then played around with it on Photoshop, changing the levels and saturation until parts of her face were hidden. I like the way the shadows on her face have turned out, I think the low key lighting suits the ambiguous horror style really well. Through studying copies of empire magazine I found there are often key features which are included on every cover that they produce. I have tried to include these within my front cover in my own style which suits the ‘horror style’ issue I have produced.

 

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In this scene, the main protagonist runs through a series of dark rooms. The shot is filmed as a POV in an attempt to help the audience engage with the character. The only light comes from a flashlight, the light is eventually shone on the antagonists face. The reason I have chosen this scene is the use of light to elevate fear within the scene.

In this scene a close up/longshot of the window frame and grounds is used in an attempt to help the audience see the setting. Both shots use focus to keep the shots interesting and create a sence of ambiguity in the audience.

In this scene the main antagonist is standing in a longshot. The reason I like this scene is that you cannot really properly make out the features of the antagonist due to the lighting and the use of a dark costume. Despite this it is clear that it is the main antagonist. In the trailer the antagonist is jump cut around the room, creating quite a disorientating effect.

I chose this scene because I often see the use of high angle shots of stairs within horror movies, the concept of looking down up a character running up stairs seems to work well in creating tension.

Both of these shots are very quick, and work as one of the few oppotunities that the audience have to have a look at the antagonist. I think little sneak peaks like this work well in keeping the audience interested.

This is the first shot in our trailer and works as an establishing shot for our setting. I think that our establishing shot helps to show the audience that our setting is a creepy building and the big metal gates are quite a classic convention in horror.

In both these scenes close ups are used to help reveal story line. At this point in our trailer it is not clear who the main protagonist is and I think shots like this help to create that sence of mystery.

While these two shots are not completely similar, they are both close up shots. Having close up shots of the antagonist is a classic  horror convention and is essential in simply making the trailer scary. I've seen that these close ups are normally very quick and used as a scare tactic.

I think scenes with doors in horror is quite are classic ones. The concept of opening a door and not knowing what is behind it could be considered a horror convention in itself and is definetly useful for creating tension and for following up with jumpy moments!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/59357644@N06/5514651714/

Within our trailer we used a combination of short quick shots and longer, tension building shots in order to keep the audience interested, I think this fits into the forms and conventions of horror well, as in most horrors there are parts which build tension followed by a ‘jumpy’ moment. We tried to make our horror trailer fit the conventions by keeping it at a pace where you could understand what was going on but allowed tension to be slowly built throughout the trailer. There are a number of these moments within our trailer, some examples of which would be when the chair moves in the empty room, and the build up to it, another example would be at the end of the trailer when the protagonist is running through the rooms in the dark and the flashlight settles on the antagonists face.

The whole setting for our trailer was directly affected by our research on horror movies. The place we filmed in was an old naval mental hospital and this seemed very appropriate for a horror movie. I think that this setting worked really well and some of the shots of the setting work really well with the narrative. The opening shot of the massive metal gates opening is a good example of us trying to use something which has direct ties to classic horror conventions. I think the final scene with the POV shot running through the rooms works really well too,  having an empty building with nothing in it really helped in making this scene effective.

Some of the scenes within the trailer are shot with a slight canted angle, we done this in an attempt to make the audience feel slightly disorientated and on edge, some of the canted angles are not immediately obvious but I think that it still has an effect on how you interpret the trailer. We also used low angles which also gives a slightly disorientating effect on how the trailer is viewed. Another type of shot that we have used that I think has really worked well is POV shots, we have quite a few shots which are taken as POV’s, and multiple shots which could be interpreted as being POV’s. I think that in nearly all of these they are used very effectively and definitely give that creepy ‘being watched’ feeling that is present in so many horror films.

Within the trailer we wanted to include key themes such as isolation, ambiguity and loneliness, all 3 being key conventions of horror. I feel that the way we constructed the trailer, along with the way we determined how edited the light on most scenes contributed greatly to this. I think the music and sound also works well in creating a mysterious feeling throughout the trailer.

We also aimed to create ambiguity in the way the antagonist and protagonist are revealed. Especially within the case of the antagonist, their identity is never truly revealed which seems to leave the trailer with an open ending and leaves the audience in the position to want more. The identity of the protagonist is slowly revealed throughout the trailer and having the last scene as a POV was an attempt to let the audience identify with the character.

Analysis of horror posters. <--- click for flickr analysises.

AUDIENCE RESEARCH

The first method of audience research we carried out was a short questionnaire which aims to collect a mixed selection of qualitative and quantitative data. The aim of this questionnaire was to try and find out some very basic information about horror movies; what people's favorites are, why they like them or who they see them with. While not in depth, the collected data will allow us to make our further research much more defined and in-depth.

Original Trailer Concept

The story that we came up with was based around memories bieng trapped within objects.
Our story is based around the idea that the ghost of a murdered young girl is trapped within a necklace. We wanted our movie to be based around the idea of the supernatural. None of us were particularly interested in slasher movies and decided we did not to want to make a 'gore-fest' horror as these just really did not interest us. One movie we did look at and really enjoy was Paranormal Activity; we all really enjoyed the tension created by the certain scenes within the trailer. We all picked up on the way the trailer would us very still scenes in order to build tension and then something would suddenly move, supposedly by some supernatural force. We would like to include something like this within our trailer, and it will be largely based on the idea of creating lots of tension in the audience!

Mood Board.

Horror movie ideas

IDEA 1

APOCALYPTIC HORROR.

Scientist working for american drug company creates cure for AIDS which stops the virus destroying immune system. It is tested on people, found to work on 5% of people, other 95% seems to have no effect on. Drug is set for release when test subjects seem to start showing bad symptoms.The scientist is money hungry and seeks to bring in the massive wealth which can be gained by mass selling the drug worldwide.

People who the drug apparently had no effect on find that the virus no longer makes the immune system weaker but increases it, along with their overall speed, body strength and pain threshold. The powered up virus is then spread through bites, cut, scratches ect.

Classic biological disaster movie occurs in which scientists family + scientist work colleagues fight for survival until scientists daughter and father are alive.. father sacrifices himself to find cure for daughter bla bla bla...

IDEA 2

Similar to idea one but based around the ideas of this mind controlling fungus...

"The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas. The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today, latches on to carpenter ants as they cross the forest floor before returning to their nests high in the canopy. The fungus grows inside the ants and releases chemicals that affect their behaviour. Some ants leave the colony and wander off to find fresh leaves on their own, while others fall from their tree-top havens on to leaves nearer the ground. The final stage of the parasitic death sentence is the most macabre. In their last hours, infected ants move towards the underside of the leaf they are on and lock their mandibles in a "death grip" around the central vein, immobilising themselves and locking the fungus in position. "This can happen en masse. You can find whole graveyards with 20 or 30 ants in a square metre. Each time, they are on leaves that are a particular height off the ground and they have bitten into the main vein before dying," said David Hughes at Harvard University."

Fungus is tested on by humans until it starts coltrolling them.. apocalyptic horror starts to happen...