Evaluation Question 3 - What Kind Of Institution

Might Distribute Your Product And Why?

What is a Distributor?

• A film distributor is an independent company, a subsidiary company or occasionally an individual, which acts as the final agent between a film production company, and a film exhibitor, to the end of securing placement of the producer's film on the exhibitor's screen. In the film business, the term "distribution" refers to the marketing and circulation of movies in theatres, and for home viewing (DVD, Video-On-Demand, Download, Television etc).

Option 1: Film 4• Our media product is obviously very low budget and independent. Therefore giant

movie institutions such as Universal and Disney would not be distributing our movie. In our case and many others in a similar situation, we would have to turn to more low budget and indie distributors. After much research we found a few that would be more realistic. At the top in terms of size would be institution such as Film 4 which specialise in promoting and distributing British independent films. They use there T.V channel to show lower budget British films and get people recognised. In some rare cases the films they promote ending up becoming world famous such as Slumdog Millionaire which, despite having director Danny Boyle, was relatively low budget and had no expectations of going to the Oscars like they did. This would not be the case for our media product do to the equipment were limited to and the inexperience of our group and the lack of a crew for specific departments. But this is a recognised option for low budget independent British films.

Option 2: Vertigo Films

• However on a more realistic scale we might turn to someone like Vertigo Films. This institution produced films such as Monsters a film that worked on a budget of around half a million which is extremely low in the film industry. Like Film 4 that promote independent British films so this may be the kind of distributors that we would turn to if we made our media product full scale. Again we were limited with what we able to create so this again may be seen as an unrealistic company but these are the kind of institutions a low budget film like ours would aspire to.

Option 3: Pyramid Productions?

• In our actual opening sequence we decided to do something cool and unique and create our own production company called Pyramid Productions. While we could not distribute our own film we thought it would be interesting to have our own. It also represented the all the other unheard of institutions that would distribute the films from people like us who are just starting out and making our own films out of interest and are at one of the lowest budgets.