Evaluation Task 3 - Emma

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

The official definition of a production company is a company that provides the physical basis for works in the realms of the performing arts, new media art, film, television, radio and video.  The production company is usually responsible for fundraising for the production, handling budgeting, scheduling, scripting, casting and resource supply, the organisational staff, the production itself, post-production, distribution and marketing.

The film distributor is a company or individual responsible for the marketing of a film or production. These people set the release date for a film and select the viewing platform of the production, for example either straight through DVD release or theatrically.

Independent films like ours generally have a small return.  Most ‘indie’ filmmakers do it for the love of telling a story. However, there are ways of increasing profit, for example through advertising and product placement. Films that have been released in the past that would be institutionally similar to ours would be films like Attack the Block, which was a mid-budget British film produced by Big Talk Productions, Studio Canal, Film4 and the British Film Council. This film used a variety of production companies (as named above), which would be the source of the productions finance.

Attack the Block's Production Companies

We chose Coffee Films as our real production company, as when we researched independent film companies, we saw that they had produced some small-scale films like ours, and we thought they would be a suitable company for our production. Coffee Films is a British independent film company that was established in 1996.  In 2004 the company was recognised as one of Europe’s leading young production companies. We decided that our film would be made by a small production company because it isn’t in the same style as other Hollywood films. The company has produced thrillers such as ‘Lucid’: a psychological thriller feature set in the Scottish Highlands. They have also produced several online films, including ‘A Plaster, A Paper and a Cheese & Pickle Sandwich’: a black comedy thriller short film. While the company isn’t very well known, we think that this production would be more suited to producing our film.

Coffee Films Logo

The production company that we created ourselves is called Red Herring Productions, named after the plot twists in thrillers such as ours. We thought the colour scheme: red, white and black, looked quite dramatic, as well as thinking about the connotations of the block colours.

Red Herring Productions Logo

In 'The Warehouse Killer', the titles were displayed in this order:

• Production Company: Red Herring Productions
• Production Company: Coffee Films
• Actors (as shown in order of appearance)
• Director
• Credit to Coffee Films

The production companies had to be shown first before the film began because that's how they are shown in proper films. Then the actors names were shown in order of appearance because there were only two actors in the film and it just made more sense to have them in that order than any other. In our production, the overlay titles are displayed in the corner of the screen, so that the audience can concentrate on the action within the frame, rather than on the words. The text is white with a black outline, looking quite plain to, again, keep the viewers attention on the action within the frame.

Our film would be released on a small scale, much like the British independent film 'Attack the Block', which came out in 2011 in 66 cinemas. The film would also later be released via the internet, on sites such as Netflix or Amazon Prime.