Final Opening Sequence - Question 3

Q3 – What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

For a solid baseline, media distribution is frequently referred to as ‘the invisible art’ given that it’s a stage where all conducted and finished film products come alive and become attached to a particular audience. Distribution involves releasing and maintaining films in markets and are at it’s most influential when it is implemented vertically, film distribution is divided into three primary stages: licensing, which involves the distributors gaining a legal entitlement to manipulate or alter films, marketing, which is predominantly centred around how and when the films are going to be sold, examples being the release schedules, with films in the UK traditionally screening new films on Wednesdays and Fridays and finally logistics, which represents the phase in which fundamental distribution is providing and circulating copies of films.

On our research on the ideal independent film distributors based in the UK and the considerations gone into the determining which one is most suitable for our film, we acknowledged the fact that given our small budget and all in all, our limitations in being generally small, we were highly unlikely to attract the worldwide and renowned film distributors such as Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros and Columbia and at the same time we had to ensure that the film distributor provided support for our film genre [Action], with various, common distributors and institutions such as Axion Films, Arrow Films, Universal Pictures UK and Momentum Pictures being considered. Ultimately, it was Entertainment Film Distributors that was the media institution we had full confidence in for support for both genre and film, in other words, were very perceptive distributors in looking in the potential of our product. Other institutions for the chosen institution were Studio Canal Ltd and Filmbank Distributors Ltd.

An alternative in the form of going into the self-distribution market on social networking sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, particularly in an era where there are many ways of getting media products out in the open with technology and production of films having developed immensely over the recent decades, the main advantages of self-distribution is that it is a rapid and cost-effective way of getting media products released as well as it being like a centre of potential, primary example of potential is a person known as Freedie Wong who owns a YouTube channel named ‘FreedieW’ (named after him), well-known to be dedicated to making Live-Action short films, a link to his channel  is here:

[http://www.youtube.com/user/freddiew/videos?view=0]

[http://www.youtube.com/user/freddiew2/videos?view=0]  

However, there are flaws at the same time if we were to go into the self-distribution, with the latter requiring plentiful of dedication and commitment meaning that it is very time-consuming to the extent that it would be considered a full-time job and there would be limitations in regards to the sales and searching for buyers, who have formally established relationships with distributors. To reiterate, self-distributing on social-networking sites would have served as an alternative if we happened to have struggled to find a film distributor that would provide full support for our genre and film.