Evaluation Question 3

'What kinds of media institutions might distribute your media product and why?'
Distribution companies are highly important within the industry. Large conglomerates such as Disney sometimes invest into much smaller companies, allowing them to be able to vertically integrate into different areas of the media industry, making a larger profit for them overall. Distributors advertise the film and try to create a hype, which then in turn creates fans for the film and makes a larger target audience.
Larger conglomerates occasionally like to get involved with smaller companies to distribute, for example 'Slum dog Millionaire', which was made by an interdependent film company and ended up making millions after distribution by Fox Searchlight. This is a particularly small budget film, so would only appeal to a particular group of distributors- small budget, and most likely interdependent companies. Companies such as Film 4 tend to distribute small-budget films like ours because they like to support small companies, and they have done that in the past with companies such as 'Rook Films', which had a very small budget and had to film within two weeks. Our film opening is typical of one made by a small British independent company because it was made on a very tight budget, there are no amazing special effects or anything like that because we couldn't afford it. It would not be distributed by a large conglomerate such as Lionsgate or Disney, because they tend to fund films with budgets of millions of dollars. The target audiences for our film opening is quite a local interdependent audience, compared with films that would be distributed by Disney that have a very wide, tent-pole audience.

1: Film 4 could be an ideal distributor for our film. They have distributed some films such as 'High Hopes', which made around a million in the box office. It was a very small budget film, and was made by a small interdependent company like us called 'Skouras Films'. Their budgeting is fairly low meaning they cannot reach out to very large, tent pole audiences, but they have the ability to reach small target audiences like ours, which is perfect for what we would be looking for.

2: Fox Searchlight. Fox searchlight is a subsidiary of the 20th century fox film company, and have funded many British interdependent films before. These include 'The Gods must be crazy', 12 years a slave, and bird-man, and these films have all won various awards. A company like this would be good for our film, because they tend to fund films like the one we have made, which may bring in more money for the film overall.

3: Studio Canal. Studio canal is a european distributing company. This company likes to choose slightly different films to distribute, such as ones made by very low budget companies and those that are fairly create and slightly non-conventional in ways. The narrative of our opening doesn't quite fit normal conventions for film openings so this company would be perfect for us, and also our budget is fairly small so that wouldn't be an issue for this company. This would help our film a lot because they would bring the perfect target audience for our film, then ensuring that we have a larger target audience to aim at and making more money for the film and getting a larger success rate. Also, the films this company tend to distribute usually are filmed in rural locations and the filmers don't travel far across the world, and this perfectly fits with us because we filmed the whole opening in a very rural location with a low amount of special effects. Studio Canal have distributed films such as Paddington, and the emperors new clothes, all made by small interdependent film companies such as ours.