Question 3

What kind of media institution will distribute your film?

A film distributor is company or individual responsible for releasing films to the public either theatrically or for home viewing (DVD, Video-On-Demand, Download, Television etc). A distributor may do this directly (if the distributor owns the theaters or distribution networks) or through theatrical exhibitors and other sub-distributors.

Distribution is about releasing and sustaining films in the market place. It includes an advertising and release campaign to promote the film to its target audience, they would distribute,adverts,posters and other techniques such as trailers in cinemas that would be releasing and showing the film.

Because our film is very low budgeted it’s highly unlikely that it would be viewed in mainstream cinemas such as the Odeon, Cineworld, Vue Etc, as our film doesn’t have the same material and actors such as top Hollywood blockbusters so therefore it would be distributed on a much small scale compared to other films.

Mainstream distributors such as paramount pictures, Columbia pictures, and Warner brothers have distributed films such as inception, seven pounds and salt. However as our film wouldn’t be distributed by these companies we would go to independent films distributors that would be more interested in promoting our films.

You tube a much known popular website for short films, and home videos is a very cheap and easily accessible website to promote our film on, it is used globally with high viewing rates making our film viewed on a wider scale. Our film would be drawn into competition with other short films that have been posted so we would have to worry about whether our film attracts the audience that uses you tube, making it difficult for us to get a high number of views, we would have to post link on websites such as face book so people could easily access our web link online directly taking them to our film. Facebook could also be used to post our film, used by an estimated of 42 million people mainly teenagers and young adults globally; similar to you tube it is a cheap and easily accessible way of viewing our film ‘forsaken’ This will also encourage our film to spread thought-out our intended audience through interest and topic of conversation.

Film festivals are one of the forms that be used to screen our film to a wide audience ;a good example of film festivals being used to distribute films is UK drama ‘ Bullet Boy’ a low budget, independent feature helmed by first-time feature director Saul Dibb. Following festival screenings at the end of 2004, the film quickly gathered a reputation as the first film to tackle the difficult subject of contemporary gang and gun crime in Britain’s inner cities. In Hackney, where the film is set, local people saw the film contributing, in one way or another, to the ongoing debate. By the time the film was released, it had accumulated both word-of-mouth and press coverage in the news pages. Like bullet boy our film is a low budget independent product using film festivals would benefit our film as it would offer recognition in the public and film industry.

The British Urban Film Festival (BUFF) was formed in July 2005 to showcase urban independent cinema in the absence of any such state-sponsored activity in the UK. This film festival would not only help us gain knowledge and advice but also a better insight into how film festival work and we could use that to further our distrubuting in the future, BUFF may be intrested in distrubuting out film because of audience that we were considering to target being of a urban heritage which Is what they specialise in.


Another potential distrubutor we could use is ‘Dogwoof’ http://www.dogwoof.com/ a organisation that supports independent film making and “is renowned for supporting independent film in non-traditional ways.”