Evaluation: Question 3 - Institutions

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



From being taught how vital institutions are in a film's development and success from pre-production to post-release, we were aware that the decisions we made needed to be informed and educated in order to be appropriate to our film idea.


Below is a 'Prezi' presentation I made explaining our main institutional choices:






'GEMM Productions' share similarities also with producer Film4, a much larger version of what we aspired to be comparable to. They have produced films like Submarine, This Is England, Attack The Block, 12 Years A Slave and The Inbetweeners Movie. sharing similarities in either serious content, drama genre, teenage/young adult audiences, or combinations of these. Unlike major studio productions common in Hollywood, we would rely on challenging themes, good acting, and intelligent plot lines - a convention of independent films - rather than huge name actors and expensive SFX.


Marketing

Through StudioCanal, we would market our film nationally with strong use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Short-form entertainment such as trailers and interviews with cast would be uploaded to YouTube as our teenage/young adult audience frequently use this media platform 'on the go' wherever they are, accessing it from smartphones as well as laptops and computers at home. All of this would be linked from a Facebook page as the central hub of our campaign. Below is an example from The Double (2013) similar to what we would aim for:

StudioCanal's Facebook page for The Double sharing links to related content as well as using Hashtags (#) to link to mentions of the film on Instagram, Twitter, and elsewhere on Facebook. We share target audience age with this film and would address them similarly.

Traditional above-the-line marketing such as TV adverts, posters and billboards would be difficult to fund for us nationwide, but a limited poster campaign would be possible. This would probably only be present in cities such as London and Manchester as our main audience resides there and it would be difficult and expensive to try to reach rural audiences of our age group in more remote areas of the UK. We would use a simple but powerful poster also similarly to Richard Ayoade's The Double, placed in some bus stops and tube stations in cities for example, raising awareness to our audience as they commute to school, work, or university.

We would begin the poster campaign and start posting on the Facebook page a few weeks prior to film release - typical of independent films - as opposed to months of  campaigning as many high-concept, well financed studio films do. The posters would last the duration of the film's time in cinema. The Facebook page would remain to promote a DVD release and online streaming. While it is out in theatres,  the page would post positive audience and critical responses to continue to attract its audience. Social media popularity with 16-24s means we can reach them across the UK, with viral potential of our 
                                                                                    page as its content is shared - all for free.


Release

'Consequences' would be released in a small number of cinemas in only in major cities in the UK e.g. London, Glasgow, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, etc from just before the start of the 2014 school Summer holidays, as members of our audience in school or university will be freed up to watch our film in the cinema. It would be released for a limited time only - 2 weeks - as the audience numbers attracted by the relatively small campaign will not be able to sustain sufficient ticket sales for any longer than this.

Post Release

After hopefully getting a deal from cinema chains such as Cineworld, Vue and Odeon in Britain, our film could have rights to stream bought by websites such as Love Film and Netflix, allowing our audience to consume the media product on more platforms such as mobile, tablet and PC/Mac.

We accept the high likelihood that our film will be streamed illegally on websites such as Pirate Bay and uTorrent, as our core 16-24 year old audience are tech savvy and often view films in this way. Another reason this is likely to happen is because the cinema release would probably be very limited, giving less people the opportunity to watch it there, and meaning consumption via other media increases in probability. Despite the fact that free, illegal streaming decreases our profits, it does lead to more views and better potential to receive critical acclaim, and perhaps reputation as a 'cult classic'.



I believe our institutional choices were realistic and believable due to wide as well as in depth research into institutions, and some of the films they were behind. This gave us a good platform and reasoning to choose our proposed institutions from.