Audience and Institutions Essay

  

Assess The Importance of Marketing I the media area you have studied.

In the film industry, the role of marketing has alway been important in order for a film to do well in the box office and be successful. It is important for a film to be marketed so that people will know that the movie is coming out. The main goal when marketing a film is to interest the public enough so that they will want to see the film.

Before a company can start marketing a film, they first must figure out who they plan on marketing the film to. By this it is meant that film companies need to figure out their target audience to promote their film to and who their primary consumers may be. For example, the  movie company Universal is known for making movies of many different genres for many different audiences so when they came out with Furious 7 in 2015, they had to find the right audience to promote the movie to. For this movie, it would most likely be teenagers and adults who love action and they would want to avoid promoting to small children This task can be a lot easier for other film companies such as Disney who primarily produces films directed towards children or A24 who typically comes out with horror movies directed towards adult audiences.This stage in the marketing process is important because it helps for the company to create a marketing strategy that will be successful in gaining the attention of its target audience.

Once the film has their target audience in mind, they can start on creating the promotions for the film. This is probably the most important part of marketing. With so many movies coming out at once, it is important for a film to have a creative and interactive strategy of marketing that helps the film to stand out amongst the rest. There are many different ways for a film to be promoted from cast interviews to trailers and teasers and even games. In order to promote a film, institutions will use synergy. An example of this would be when Disney's Beauty and the Beast was being marketed. Disney used corporate synergy when a couple of the movie’s stars hosted a special edition of the popular television show ‘The Bachelor’ on ABC to promote the upcoming release. This helped to spread news about the film to a range of audiences worldwide and possibly helped the film gain its impressive 1.3 billion in the box office. Another popular way that film companies will promote their product is by using cross media convergence. When Warner Brothers came out with The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, they  were able to connect with other forms of media to create a videogame for the film. It is important for a movie to be marketed as much as possible so that it stays relevant and does not get overlooked by potential viewers.

Since times have changed so much, a lot of marketing is online. Movie companies have learned to use social media apps to their advantage. Marketing using social media is very important nowadays because it seems almost everyone has at least one form of it. In fact, a recent statistic found that in 2019, approximately 70% of the population use social media in the U.S. alone. Instagram can be used to show pictures and posters for the film, Youtube can be used to cast interviews and trailers and Twitter is used to keep audiences updated on release dates and other news for the film being marketed. For example, Universal Studios released multiple trailers in 2015 for their upcoming film Jurassic World. One of the platforms that these trailers were released on was the social media site Youtube. This allowed for the film to gain much more attention and relevance among viewers. It is important for films to be marketed using social media because it allows for a much more wide range area where people from all over the country and world can see promotions for the film allowing for better opening weekend. However, since there's so much going on in the online world of social media, a film can be very easily overlooked by users that's why it is very important to have a clever and unique marketing strategy and campaign when marketing online.

Another successful way for marketing a film is by creating merchandise before the release of the movie. In 2017 Marvel’s Spider-Man: Homecoming used a unique way of selling their merchandise. While most films start to sell merchandise after the release of the film, Spider-Man: Homecoming began selling small action figures in stores before its release. Doing this hyped up Marvel fans and made them more eager to go see the film. This strategy resulted in a huge premiere as the movie was released worldwide. The marketing process is important because it is the time where the film is going to try and get as much attention as possible and a clever way of doing this is by releasing merchandise for your film. This is able to hype of fans and possibly make viewers more interested and willing to go see the film which is the exact reason a movie is marketed.

 In the film industry, marketing is one of the most important steps to the a films distribution. The process of marketing has many steps that are all equal in importance. The first step is finding a target audience to promote the film towards, this allows for a better chance of having a large opening weekend since its promoting a film to a niche that would  be interested in seeing the film. The next step is creating clever and unique ways of marketing. This can be done using synergy and cross media convergence along with social media to cleverly market the film and have it gain relevance to the public eye.Movies can also release merchandise for the film so that it can gain more hype and make viewers more excited to watch the film. It is important for a film to be marketed so that viewers know that the movie is coming out and the more effective the marketing strategy is, the more viewers the film is most likely to get.

Practice Essay for 24 Extract

In the extract from the television show 24, there are many different filming and editing techniques used. Along with these techniques, different sounds are also used. The combination of these sounds and techniques help to create a feeling of tension between the characters and suspense for the audience. The tension between the two characters is created because of the lack of trust that they have for each other. This tension helps to establish what the director may have been trying to convey: during times of stress and tension, one must decide if power is more important trust.  

The extract opens with a woman sitting in a dimly lit room as a man walks in. The lighting in the room sets up the mood to be serious and mysterious. The only natural light is coming from small barred windows and the other light is coming from artificial locations such as the lamp or ceiling lights. The lack of natural light helps to create a feeling of being trapped and not being free. The man looks at the woman and the camera zooms in on her face, he then looks at a surveillance camera in the corner of the room and the camera zooms in on the camera. The use of zoom in the extract helps to point out certain details in the location. The zoom of the woman's face may imply that the man and woman have a relationship with each other. The zoom of the camera implies that the man and woman are being watched. For a short period of time the man and woman just look at eachother, there is no dialogue between them, only the diegetic sounds of breathing and some low background music. The lack of communication between the two characters helps to create the tension between them. We then witness a cutaway to what looks like an office where two people are silently watching the man and the woman on a small TV. The camera cuts back to the interrogation room and the camera zooms in on a clock after the woman sitting looks at it, implying that she is running out of time for something. Something that becomes repetitive in the extract is that prior to each time the camera zooms in on something, there is an eyeline match between the character and the object that has been zoomed in on. The main male character had an eyeline match with the camera and the woman had an eyeline match with the clock. The purpose of using an eyeline match edit may have been to show that those objects that are being zoomed in on have a relationship with the character that looked at them, this helps to create more mystery and suspense within the scene.

After looking at the clock, the woman sitting then says something to the man. This is the first time that dialogue is spoken in the film. With this dialogue, it becomes apparent that the two characters don’t like each other. The man doesn’t trust the woman enough to take her to the destination that she requested to go to. The dialogue in this scene is extremely important to what the director is trying to convey. The dialogue explains that in order for the woman to stop a bomb from going off, the man interrogating her must trust her enough to allow her to go to the location she requested. This perfectly shows the theme of having to trust one in order to get an answer to a problem. In this scene, the acting of the characters really shines through. The man becomes very angry and frustrated with the woman he is interrogating and he eventually flips the desk over to try and intimidate the woman. This shows an obvious power struggle between the two characters. The woman does a great job staying in character and still being serious but also being smug at the same time. The male character’s frustrated and frantic attitude paired with female characters calm and in control attitude helps the audience understand why there may be a trust barrier between the two and it also adds to the tension of the scene. Another thing that is noticed in this scene is that during many points of dialogue, a close up of the actors face is shown when they speak. The use of this close up helps to create more suspense and traction between the characters as they speak. The close up only puts those two faces on the camera that creates a feeling of tightness which may connect to the tightness that the two characters fell towards each other.

Moving on into the extract, tensions begin to rise as the man and the woman continue to argue. Another cutaway happens and we see the same people watching the man and woman in the interrogation room. This cutaway is important because it shows that the man and woman are being watched by someone else and it implies that the man is not totally free to do what he wants to get the information out of the woman. After the cutaway, the woman being interrogated tells that man that he must follow her lead. After she says this, there is a long moment of silence where the camera switches back and forth between the man and the woman. This shot reverse shot effect helped to establish the tension between the two characters' struggle for power. This struggle for power was made even more evident when the man suddenly pushed the woman against a wall and began to choke her. This action shows the man's rage building up as he tries to gain his power stance with the woman. Incidental music is played during this scene which builds the tension in the scene and between the characters. The scene then creates a split screen effect between the people in the office from the cutaway and the man and woman in the interrogation room. This was a very interesting effect that was used because it showed why the man looked at the camera in the beginning and why the people in the cutaway were watching the interrogation room. This cutaway also adds to some of the stress that the audience feels. Watching the man choke the woman in the interrogation room as the office workers run to stop him will help to keep the audience at the edge of their seat. The extract ends with the characters from the cutaway breaking into the interrogation room and stopping the man from choking the woman.

The theme of the extract is that in times of stress of and tension, one must decide if power is more important than trust. The different editing and filming techniques along with the different uses of sound and the mise en scene helps to create the tension between the characters. This tension is increased as the audience begins to notice the lack of trust and the power struggle that is between the woman and the man in the interrogation room. The real conflict of the extract goes to the man who is interrogating, he must decide if he should trust the woman and give her power or if he should keep his power stance and not trust the woman. The dialogue, cutaways, and acting helps to create a clash between the characters. The uses of dim lighting, zooms, close ups, and eyeline matches all help to increase the growing tension in the scenes. The incidental music and split screen creates a serious and mysterious tone for the extract that keeps the audience at the edge of their seat. Altogether, the different filming and editing techniques allow interesting drama that keeps the audience guessing.

Creative Critical Reflection

   Hello! This collection of videos is my creative critical reflection for my movie. For each project that I have done this year, I have made a reflection on it. For my commercial, my reflection was just an essay that answered these questions. My music video project had a creative PowerPoint to reflect what I did for my project and to answer the questions. And for this project, I had to make videos to answer the question. I thought that this was a very interesting way to create my CCR. I knew that it had to be creative but I didn’t know how to do that. A lot of my classmates were fake interviews and it looked really good. I didn’t have anybody to help me with this to make an interview so I tried to do it by myself and just play two different characters. While I was filming it, I realized that I looked really dumb and I wasn’t in to the self interview. I tried thinking of something creative that I could do by myself that is creative and then an idea cane to me: behind the scenes for my movie. As you can see in the videos above, I tried to make my CCR like a behind the scenes special. I thought of this project as being part of the special features interviews that you sometimes see on DVDs for movies. My project was to be a behind the scenes (or behind the screams) of “Signed, The Watcher”, my film,  and it was supposed to be a cast interview with myself where I answered questions to the camera. This was the best idea that I could come up with for being by myself to film. I had a great time editing this and I hope that you enjoy it as well!

Signed, The Watcher Movie

     This is it. This is our movie. This project took my group and I such a long time to create. From having to film to editing to re-shoots to re-edits, all while in the middle of a global pandemic, this project was extremely difficult to do. This project was to be the opening of a original horror film. My group and I decided to work within the horror genre. Our movie focuses on a group of teens who are trying to find their missing friend, once they find her, they also find a note from "The Watcher" explaining that he knows what the friend group did and he is gonna get his revenge. Though this movie was pretty hard to make, it was extremely fun. I really enjoyed being able to get together with my friends to shoot the film but editing was a different story since we couldn't get together due to the pandemic. Anyway, this is our final product and I hope you enjoy it!

Hollaback Girl Music Video

     Hello! This is another one of my previous works. This project was the music video for the Gwen Stefani song "Hollaback Girl". This was another really fun project that my group and I did.  For this project, we had to shoot the scenes on our own time and it had to be a minute and fifteen seconds long. This project gave my group and I lots of learning experience. When working through this project, we learned how important it is to follow the storyboard. I hope you have as much fun watching it as I did making it!

McDonald’s Commercial

     This is my McDonald's commercial also known as my very first  Media Studies Project. in this project, my group and I had to make a 30 second commercial for a product, the product we chose was McDonald's Fast Food. as you can see in the video, we were pretty knew with all this stuff, that is why some scenes my look pretty choppy and the video exceeds the time a little. This was a very fun project and it was also a great learning experience for us.

Re-edits for Signed, The Watcher

     Hello! So I was finally able to do some editing  for my movie project. This has been such a difficult thing to do for my group and I since the school closed due to quarantine. Since then, we have tried to use many different editing sites but none of them seemed to work. We started talking o use Pinnacle Studios at our school but then the school closed. From their we tried to use iMovie but it didn’t have the fonts that we needed and none of us had and advanced version of it. Another editing software that we tried to use was Wondershare Filmora. The reason that we didn’t use this is because in order to get a video without a watermark, we had to make a subscription to Filmora but that was a lot of money. Then, I later found out that my older brother already had a subscription with Filmora and he let edit my project on it. I wasn’t able to work with my group when using this software because we were all social distancing. I was able to video chat with them and get their feedback while I edited the movie. The first thing I did with this new software was to start from scratch. I got rid of the original movie that we edited and just imported all of the shots separately onto Filmora. I then placed the clips in the correct order and began to cut some stuff out so that I could reach the time limit of two minutes. When I was finished with that, I put in the opening titles. I changed the font that we were originally gonna use because it looked more playful than scary and I wanted the movie to have a more serious tone. After that I added in some creepy music and then sound effects. The sound effects that I used were ambient nighttime sounds, a scream, and a power shutting off. I had a great time editing this film and I am so happy with the way it turned out. These re-edits have made my movie so much better!