A Field in England: Case Study

By Trisha Vekaria

Production

• It was produced by Rook Films and developed & financed by Film 4.0 (a subsidiary of Film4 Productions) – it is one of the first to receive funding from the BFI's New Models Distribution Fund strand, which supports experimental release models. Film4 Productions has helped produce many highly successful films e.g. 12 Years A Slave, 127 Hours, Trainspotting etc.

• Ben Wheatley has previously worked with Rook Films for two other movies: Sightseers [2012] and Kill List [2011]. He is working with them again for a sequel for one of his previous works called The ABCs of Death 2.

• Rook Films is an independent company, which tends to produce films of the horror, drama, crime and comedy genres.

• It was digitally shot in black & white.

• Filmed lasted for12 days in the countryside in Guildford, Surrey in September 2012.

• The budget was £300,000.

Distribution

• It was originally released in the UK and was the first time a British film was released across several platforms simultaneously – on 17 sites: on DVD, video-on-demand, theaters and free TV. This was done as it is difficult for independent filmmakers to get noticed in conventional theatrical distribution. Multi-platform distributing allows filmmakers to access new and wider audiences in new ways.

• The distributors were Film4 Productions & Picturehouse Entertainment and Drafthouse Films (USA). Drafthouse Films is said to distribute movies that are "provocative, visionary and artfully unusual films new and old from around the world”. Also, Wheatley’s previous film The ABCs of Death [2013] has been distributed by them in the USA as well.

• It partnered with Cinedigm (which is the leading independent content distributor in the US) in September 2013, and they released the film on 6/02/14 on various platforms and formats.

• It gained a box office £64,349.

Exhibition

• For the cinema release in the UK, Weltons Brewery brewed a limited edition ale to give to cinema-goers. The beer had the tagline "Open Up and Let the Devil In" to tie into the use of hallucinogens in the film. The ale was bottled with yeast, which required a slow pour to ensure "continuous secondary fermentation" for the beer to be fresh.

• In the US, it was screened in only 13 cinemas, but had a multi-platform release.

• In the UK, it was played on the Film 4 channel from 10.45pm to 12.10am without commercial breaks – it drew a combined audience of 288,000 (including time-shifted channel Film4 +1). This number increased to 357,000 due to recorded viewing (which is higher than Film4’s slot average of 346,000).

• More than 11,000 units of DVDs were shipped to Amazon, HMV, WHSmith, Asda and Sainsbury’s. Weekend sales, after the release, of DVDs from Amazon and HMV amounted to 1,462 – the number of Blu-ray copies sold was slightly higher than DVDs.