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

Distribution is extremely important within British film. New technologies means that films can now be digitally distributed into cinemas either using fibre optic cables, satellite or portable hard drive. It has got much easier for film distributers over the years but there is still quite a lot of pressure on them. When looking for our film distributer, we had to look for a company/subsidiary in which we can trust, we looked for good reviews and recommendations from other independent companies who have been through the same processes. Its much harder for independent film companies to find distributers as the process takes a very long time. Compared to Hollywood production companies who already have a distributer in place before production even begins, independent film companies have to find their distributers once finished the film. There are many problems with distribution like piracy, which is extremely dangerous for independent film companies as they make most of their money from ancillary sales. Luckily new technology is being made like Blu-ray which has encryption codes to stop piracy.

The distribution process is very important, depending on whether you distribute your film correctly can determine the amount of people come and watch your film. The aim of distribution is to send it to as many people as possible, the more contacts you have the better, because the more cinemas that screen your film the more money you make. Its good to contact a well known independent film distributer because they may have contacts worldwide, this is better because this means your film won't only be played in the UK but hopefully it could be played all around the world; instantly increasing a companies revenue.

Having taken all these points into consideration we discussed the different ways of distributing our product and what suited our moving image piece best. As a group we felt that we should be aiming more towards the Independent production companies as we are aware these companies produce very low budget films just like our own. Apart from the Sony camera we borrowed from school everything from the props/costumes to the filming locations were all of a very low budget. The reason for this being we didn't have a lot of money to spend on props etc, because we were aiming our film more towards the independent institutions and we know full well that they only produce low budget films. The institutions that we had in mind were Film 4 and momentum pictures, we felt that these companies would suit our product best and they would be more than happy to sell and distribute our product. If we went to a high budget institution and granted them to take our product then I feel that would have been a waste of time as our product doesn't resemble the institution at all; we have a low budget film, therefore, we aim towards the low budget institutions.