EVALUATION QUESTION 2 - Distribution & Audience

"How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text"?

Part 1 Distribution 

In this part I will address the definitions of distribution, which explain what it means and what a distributor is. I will then talk about the Big 6 and the mini-major studios. Lastly I will post a YouTube show, which I created for distribution. 

Definition 1 - Taken from Wikipedia 

A film distributor is responsible for the marketing of a film. The distribution company is usually different from the production company. Distribution deals are an important part of financing a film.

Definition 2 - Taken from BBC

In terms of shorts, a distributor is an individual or organisation who will represent your film at festivals and markets around the world and who will attempt to sell it to television (including terrestrial, cable and satellite), airlines and other companies that show short films. The major short film distributors in the UK are (in alphabetical order): Dazzle, Futureshorts, Network Ireland TV and Shorts International. See the distributor section of our Related Links: Exhibition & Distribution – Shorts for information and links to these distributors and others.

In terms of features, a distributor is generally an organisation who handles the theatrical release of a film in a particular country as well as the marketing and circulation of films for home viewing (DVD, Video-On-Demand, Download, Television etc). Often feature films have different distributors representing them in different territories and different distributors handling the home-viewing circulation. Independent film distribution in the UK is generally managed by indie distributors such as Metrodome, Optimum Releasing and Momentum. See the distributor section of our Related Links: Exhibition & Distribution – Features for information and links to these distributors and others. 

Distributors

On this website: http://www.the-numbers.com/market/distributors I found a table with the overview of the market share for each distributor from 1995-2016. As you can see Warner Bros. (one of the Big 6) lies at the top 1 spot with it's 655 movies that it has distributed. After that follow the other 5 member of the Big 6, which are Walt Disney, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures. 

The rest below are all part of mini major studios although it has lately been discussed that one could talk about the Big 7 due to the latest success of Lionsgate. 

The table below is one, which I got from wikipedia that gives you the overview of the Big 6 conglomerates.

As mentioned above these are the current majors. However, there are several other distributors such as Lionsgate, Dream Works etc. These are known as mini-major studios. 

As mentioned earlier a created a Youtube show to answer questions on distribution. I created it so that my audience would send me snapchats with questions only on distribution and then I would reply to them.



There was one question with the advantages and disadvantages on self-distribution. Since we are self-distributing I created a podcast also in which I explain the advantages and disadvantages of it. I got these from the BBC website.



Part 2 Audience

For this part I decided to create a radioshow together with my sister. She is playing the interviewer and I am the interviewee who answers all the questions on how our product engaged with our audience.

My AS Media Journey

This is a post in which you will find a prezi that will explain how my journey has been throughout this year, what I have learned and how our group has developed. I hope you enjoy it.

Podcast 4: Radio Interview on Audience

This is my 3rd podcast in which I am doing a radioshow together with my sister. I am answering questions for the evaluation question 2 on how our product is engaging with the audience.

Audience Feedback 3 - Titles

After having created a title sequence, we screened it for some students and our media teacher in class. This post is going to contain the videos of the feedback and the title sequence.

Here is the title sequence:




This is some audience feedback we got from our teacher and from students who gave us their opinion on the fonts we should use and the transitions we should use when introducing the titles:



Our teacher commented a lot on the font, where we were told that it would be good to use "The Friday the 13th" font, since it denoted that we were inspired from that film for our titles.

We didn't really agree with the audience feedback that we got from the students, since they really disliked the "Friday the 13th" font. However, they gave us useful feedback for the transitions.

BV: Our Target Audience 2

I did an updated and more developed post on the target audience for our slasher film, following on from Sophie's post on target audience. 

For our film, we knew that we had to stick to a very specific and typical target audience. This is because the slasher genre has often been called an example of 'genre purism' essentially, this means that the conventions of the genre have been in place so long, and are so specific, that attempting to deviate too far from tradition or changing these conventions can result in a films financial failure. This leads onto how our film opening engaged with our audience/audiences, which I will be covering later on.




Typically, the target audience 
for horror/slasher films is 15-25 years old. Although quite a few of these films have an age rating of 18, 15 year olds still have access to films online or on DVD, making it difficult to enforce these age ratings. 


Here is the BBFC page for Saw, which shows the rating and explains why it was given.

So, deciding the age of our target was very straightforward, as we have the same target audience of the majority of slasher films that exist. 



I found some statistics based around the ages and genders of horror movies. 
As can be seen, the majority of horror film viewers are between the ages of 18 and 24. 

To finish, the target audience of our film would be 15-24, and the secondary audience being 26-35.

Primary and secondary target audience

The primary audience is the audience that the film is primarily target at, so the main people who will watch the film, for example. When creating a film, the target audience is something extremely important to consider as failing to appeal to the target audience could result in the failure of the film. 

The secondary audience are people who wouldn't go and watch a film by choice, but would perhaps be influenced by the primary audience. To explain, a young teenager who really wants to see a film (and would be the primary audience) could bring someone with them, a parent or a friend for example to watch it with them, making them the secondary audience. 

So for our film, due to the fact that the second largest percentage of viewers of horror is 25-34, we decided that this would be our secondary audience.

Audience Gender

As seen in the pie chart, more men than women watch horror films. 

This is because they can interact or relate better to the characters on screen, and the main killer is normally a man.

Women are less attracted to horror, for reasons such as the negative portrayal of women in such films. 

Character types such as the final girl are stereotypical and very negative. 

However, including romance or aspects of romance in horror/slasher films also attracts women to the film, and making horror films good 'date films'; the romance aspects appeal to the women and the gory/horror aspects to the men. 

Therefore, our primary target audience is men as they view horror more than women.

On the other hand, we actually wanted our film to appeal more to women than the average slasher movie, by representing our main character differently and ensuring that it would pass the Bechdel test. (I expanded further on this on another blog post.)

Our Target Audience

The genre for our movie is horror/slasher. I did a post, where I was outlining and explaining what the typical conventions of the slasher genre were. 

Before doing this post, I decided to do some research to find out who our target audience and primary audience would be. We wanted to create a movie that appealed to both males and females. The typical hybrid genre ROM-COM is one of the main genres that the subsidiary Working Title is creating. However, ROM-COM's such as Love Actually or Bridget Jones Diary appeal more to the female audience because of the romance genre. It does on the other hand also appeal to some male audience because there is considered to be comedy in it. 
When I then did this research, I decided to look for the common types of movies that the general public enjoy watching and found these statistics from the British Film Institute from 2012, which show that the number of males and females below 35, that watch the horror genre is around the same.

Due to this, we came to the conclusion that our main target audience, were males and females from the age rate of 15 to 24 and that our secondary audience would be from the age of 24 to 35. Since, it is also unlikely that a slasher genre gets an age rate under 15, if there are violent scenes and sexual assault, we thought that 15 and above would be the correct age. 

Bronwen and I intend to do questionnaires later on where we will ask the audience what they think of our basic idea and what they would like us to change etc.