Production schedule and equilibrium shot planning

How effective is the relationship between my main product and ancillary texts?

Film marketing and distribution

A film distributor’s profession is to strategically market a film, through the means of media, they decide the viewing platform of the movie, the release date and how the audience will view all of this information. Films can be exhibited in a variety of ways, popular, mainstream films can be viewed at the cinema, along with these are usually an upscale premier to promote the film, which will often attract a lot of press; therefore, more public acknowledgement, as it will be spread across media platforms such as social media, in particular Twitter, as well as more traditional media outlets such as entertainment news and chat shows on TV as well as promotions in print based media such as magazines, such as my magazine cover and billboards. Smaller films, often with a lower budget will sometimes go straight to DVD release, often this means less marketing and promotion takes place; nonetheless they are still advertised, for example, TV adverts from high street stores advertising the latest film releases on DVD, as well as this the niche audience will still most probably create a stigma around the film on social media, despite the small following, in particular young people, as this is the demographic for social media, as well as many films typically. More recently, films are being released straight onto new platforms such as Netflix, this attracts a wide range of audiences, in particular younger audiences, as often new releases are advertised on social media, some films are made exclusive to the online streaming services, whilst others are added to them a few months after release. This way of viewing films is becoming more and more popular; therefore, film distributors have the responsibility of encouraging an audience to watch films on all of these platforms, in order to make as much profit from the film as possible. Some examples of advertising exposure a film distributor would use include, social media- Youtube, Twitter etc, magazines, television, posters and billboards, films trailers (one of the key places for a trailer to be viewed is before another film at cinemas, this is effective because the audience watching the trailer are most probably film advocates already, therefore, are more inclined to watch films). In order to make the marketing successful, the distributor needs to have created a large 'reach', meaning many people have seem the advertisements and will therefore, watch the film. 

An example of a successfully marketing film is the recent action film Suicide Squad. 

Suicide Squad was released August 5th 2016, it was a huge success grossing a worldwide total of $745.6 million and I think this was mainly due to the marketing and promotional techniques. Suicide Squad is a DC comic; therefore, it was already going to gain a large stigma from DC comic fans. In 2015 the main actors and actresses (another marketing technique, since each main character already had a large following; therefore, it focussed on these identities)held a panel at comic con and released the first trailer there. Because this was released a whole year before the release date, it allowed the distributors to build up more and more popularity around the film, this included multiple posters, a lot of these focussed on particular characters, for example The Joker, because he is an already established character from previous DC comics Batman. This character is extremely popular and could be considered a household name; therefore this was an effective marketing technique to focus a lot on him because the audience who has watched other actors play this role wanted to see how Leto would portray him. Social media played a huge role in marketing this film, the certificate for this film is a 15 and the primary audience for this film is young people- millennials; which are also the main demographic for social media. The actors themselves have high profiles on social media so they were promoting the film themselves, plus the #suicidesquad was extremely popular with people spreading the reach of the film, as it was advertised on multiple posters. At one point a study of the numbers shows that the movie was the most Tweeted about summer release, reinforcing this point, on top of this Snapchat supported it by creating a Joker filter, again helping to promote the film. The promotion continued after the film was released to help create more of a reach, and therefore profit, for example the cast went on chat shows to promote the film and done interviews on both popular TV shows and radio stations as well as small online blogs and vlogs, on top of this the soundtrack was very popular, which attracted more viewers. Following the initial trailer, multiple trailers followed, this includes the official trailer which was highly successful and has gained 81million views on Youtube, reinforcing the successful reach and distribution of the film.

Entertainment magazine cover, released approx. a month before the release date.

Multiple Empire magazine covers (emphasising individual character identities, which is part of the unique selling point of the film, as fans wanted to emulate characters).

Multiple posters

How effective is the relationship between my main product and ancillary texts?

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

Developing our trailer ideas

Group horror trailer ideas

What I learnt from my research- how media theories and trailers affected our ideas