EVALUATION ACTIVITY 3: What kind of media institution might distribute our media product?

A production company is a company legally responsible for the physical production of new media, performing arts, film, radio or a television program. The company is also directly responsible for raising funds for the production. The production company can be either a small company or a larger one, selling its products to a film studio or presenting it at a theatrical venue, or, in my case of film and television, it may be the studio itself.

Some examples are:

The film distributor is the company or individual solely responsible for the marketing of a film. Because of the enormous amount of cost in money and time involved in distributing a movie, a distributor must feel confident that they can make a sufficient return on their investment. Having the backing of a major studio or a well known director or star can greatly improve the chances of securing a good distribution deal. Independent filmmakers often use film festivals as an opportunity to get the attention of distributors.

Our film would be a low budget film and therefore we would not easily find a distributor, A likely solution for low budget films would be to screen your film at a film festival, for example,  ‘Sundance’ from which you may receive distribution offers.

Another option would be the ‘British Film Institute’ who is keen to support UK distributors to help ensure that the best British and specialised films connect with a wide range of audiences across a range of platforms throughout the UK. They develop the export opportunities for British films by providing funding to promote them at major international festivals.

Two examples of Low Budget Films which have become majorly successful are, ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’ they are both self-financed, have an unknown cast and had no distribution deal prior to production, just like ours. The Blair Witch Project grossed over $300,000,000 worldwide and Paranormal Activity broke that record when the original budget was $15,000 and only $35,000 for The Blair Witch Project. This proves that with a good story, it is possible.

For our production we chose to use ‘Touchstone Pictures’ logo for the real production company as during our thriller research we found that they were involved with a lot of the movies we analysed such as, ‘Face Off’ and ‘Bringing Out The Dead’, then whilst researching Touchstone Pictures we found that it typically releases films that feature more mature themes and darker tones therefore we felt it fitted well with our film.

When creating our own production company logo we came up with the name, ‘Nebula Productions’ as we felt that we could manipulate this name in order to achieve a space theme with the font of the writing and add some space-like effects to create motion within the logo as we had found out whilst researching production companies that most of them had some motion within the logo. We also felt that the black colour involved with space would be great as a background to set the mood of the thriller by using white writing to show the binary oppositions found within the movie, eg. Good vs. Evil.