The increases in hardware and content in media industries has been significant in recent years. discuss the effect this has had on institutions and audiences in the media area you have studied.
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| Harry Macqueen (centre) and Ben Hecking on stage after their Ilkley Film Festival screening |
Answer the question below, making detailed reference to examples from your case study material to support points made in your answer.Discuss the issues raised by an institution’s need to target specific audiences within a media industry which you have studied.You must choose to focus on one of the following media areas. You may make reference to other media in your answer.• Film• Music• [etc – 6 media are listed]
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Many of Hollywood’s big names will be in attendance; it has become an article of faith that a paparazzi shot in London can be a key opinion-shifter for the all-important campaign to grab Oscar votes before polling finishes on 17 February.Theory got 10 Bafta nominations in total.
The downside of this is that, over the past decade, critics have claimed that the Baftas have lost some of their cultural distinctiveness, and become a boiled-down version of the Oscars, with the same films and actors being nominated. This year, if awards go they way they are expected to, we are likely to have exactly the same winners in both.
“I think it’s a reflection of the ‘special relationship’,” says Leslie Felperin, film critic for the Hollywood Reporter. “There’s an inevitable overlap in zeitgeist that extends to politics and culture as well as film. It’s more than it ought to be, for sure. If you look at the Césars in France, for example, they are much more proudly French, and they fly the flag for their domestic industry in a more assertive way.” (Guardian report)
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| IMDB.com |
In a colourful review, replete with some strong language, the central theme is:The film gives international audiences what they expect from Britain – a nice bit of posh – while also titillating natives with convincing oik detail.
In Kingsman: The Secret Service, out next month, a tasty little herbert called Eggsy from a London sink estate is recruited by the impeccably soigné, lah-di-dah spook Harry Hart, played by Colin Firth. Hart detects that Eggsy has the right stuff, the true Brit if you will, to transcend his oikish upbringing and become One Of Us. Now if Eggsy, played by Taron Egerton, can survive the training course in which he is pitted against a bunch of stuckup, over-entitled Oxbridge ponces (plus the token bit of hottie posh whose snobby froideur melts at our hero’s bit-of-rough charms), then he can become a Kingsman.
Sex – whether we have loads of it or none of it – is a part of all of our lives. But on the screen, its depiction is often met with shock or silliness. Female actors are often objectified, the reasons for their nudity sometimes having little to do with character, and everything to do with satisfying the male gaze
Pulling was a classic British sitcom in that it was riven with self-loathing, and its situation – the gap between its characters’ desire to pull and their capacity to do so – inherently fraught and fruitful.In Catastrophe, Horgan plays a woman who gets pregnant after a brief fling with a visiting American, played by the standup Rob Delaney. Already, this feels Working Title-ready: a sit- that more readily begets rom than com. Then there’s the detail.In, say, the similarly plotted Knocked Up there was some tension over whether a groomed high-flier and an unemployed stoner would be able to make it to the delivery room. In Catastrophe they seem ideally suited from the get-go. He’s a successful businessman who wants to move to the UK, marry her and sit through awful suppers with her friends. They are a happy couple expecting a baby. They have hot sex and give each other justifiable compliments. This is not how I want my British sitcoms to be.I don’t want them to be like Friends – soaps in disguise, scripted by a crack squad of gag writers. I don’t want them to be Americanised; to be glossy and hopeful.
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| 1: We open on a grand historic building in the South of England - a world away from TisEng's Shaun and the council estate he resides in |
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| Use the tag cloud to find more on distribution |
KEY POINT: Cinemas continue to insist on an exclusive release window as home cinema would otherwise eat substantially into their prospects, and they have gone as far as threatening to boycott a blockbuster Disney movie when they tried to reduce this window. Frankly, they will care little what an Indie micro-budget production does, and the 'cinema release' was really a marketing stunt by Warp to attract newspaper reviews!
Scroll to the end of the post for a short list of all key points.
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| Impressively, Warp secured distribution in several foreign markets, such as Norway. Note how Meadows and his previous movies are highlighted as a key selling point. |
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| All warp trailers are embedded in 1 post tagged distribution! |
This previous post looked at NBC-Universal's $35k home rental scheme, very relevant to the theme below...According to a recent survey, a fifth of Britons aim to have a dedicated cinema room by 2020 ... and 8% already do! The rise of home cinema has long been noted, but this is a step beyond having a large screen TV in the living room, being something closer to the setup seen in The Sopranos, the classic HBO series, where mafia don Tony brings round his cronies to sit in comfort and watch DVDs of such gangster flicks as The Public Enemy.
In 2013 70% of TV sets sold in the UK were classified as big – 26in-32in – and nearly 16% were were “jumbo” – 43in or bigger. This is up 4% from the year before, according to TV Licensing’s annual Telescope report on the nation’s viewing habits.An earlier report found that 8% of Brits expect to have a dedicated cinema room in their homes by 2020.With staying in firmly established as the new going out, and consumers abandoning FOMO, the fear of missing out, in favour of JOMO, the joy of missing out, there’s never been a better time to cash in on the sales opportunity offered by big nights in, and this year OLN is looking at how to host and sell the perfect movie night.As more and more traditional video and DVD rental shops have gone out of business in the face of competition from postal and on- demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix – giant Blockbuster went into administration late last year – some off-licences have stepped into the gap, offering customers DVDs for rent or sale.Automated video kiosks such as those offered by Original Video (original-video.com) have taken off in the US, where they first launched in 2002 and where there are now more than 30,000 units in operation. The model is simple, with new release movies offered for a small hire charge and, according to Original Video, they can make up to £500 a week.Even if you don’t offer DVDs yourself, this is a great time of year to inspire customers to make a big night in of their film evening with an innovative aisle-end or window display – and don’t forget to lay out the snacks, as nibbles such as popcorn, crisps and sweets are a key ingredient.To get you started, we’ve lined up some classic film choices – and suggestions to drink with them.■ Casablanca: Humphrey Bogart’s Rick is a self-confessed drunkard, and in the course of the film plenty of wine, bourbon, brandy and Cognac is consumed. But when you watch Casablanca, why not have a Champagne toast along with Rick and his lover, Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman. They’ll always have Paris.
Exposure has been set the task of creating awareness below and above the line. Producers Working Title and Universal Pictures are now looking for partners for the movie."The film is a British take on an American cop movie and we are looking for brands that are British and are aimed at the 16- to 24-year-old male market," said Annie Kearney, senior account manager, Exposure. "Snack foods, FMCGs and entertainment brands including Heinz and Blockbusters have the right profile that we are looking for. We want brands that embody the irreverence of the film," she added.CommonSenseMedia - alternative film ratings for parents: a US site that carries parental and kids' reviews, and generates a specific age rating recommendation from these, and its own editorial ratings
Parents need to know that what at first seems like a British parody of American cop flicks turns into a much bloodier (and funnier) homage to blow-'em-up blockbusters. The gun play and cartoonishly graphic violence rivals that of any Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer production, but at least the bulk of the gore is confined to the last third of the film. Like Shaun of the Dead, which was made by the same director and stars, this movie is full of colorful foul language, but it doesn't have the raunchy nastiness of similar movies. Expect cinema-savvy teens to want to check it out.MovieViral.com - releasing interactive Shaun screenplay to market World's End: There are several posts linked through here; another flags up director Wright's use of UGC: 'Wright posted a link to a video that includes scenes from all three of his films on his twitter account today. Youtuber Joel Walden mashed up the different scenes from Wright’s movies into one 2:19 minute video. Hit the jump to see it. [Read more…]'
Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End may be more associated with Cornettos than alcohol, but they’re all about beer and pubs. We recommend lager with Shaun of the Dead and bitter with The World’s End, with a cranberry juice in between for Hot Fuzz’s abstemious hero, Nick Angel.
I've cross-posted this on the rom-com and AS Coursework blogs, so won't post again here, but there is a lot of info and analysis very pertinent to British Cinema in there, with Warp and Working Title prominent in the analysis and examples used.
It is abundantly clear when we compare Warp Films With Working Title that the former's typically no-star, low budget (predominately) social realist slate does not lend itself to sequels/prequels/re-imaginings, although This is England is a notable exception, with a possible second film to add to the existing film and two TV series. WT's slate is full of franchises: Elizabeth, Bean, Bridget Jones, Nanny McPhee... its a long list.
This
is a simple but highly useful audience/narrative theory, which also
reflects standard marketing thinking (question 1 a potential distributor
will ask of a film production: who's the star?). Richard Dyer's (Amazon book list) landmark 1979 book Stars argued that the star system was central to how the media operate, and how we read texts. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (his 1986 follow-up)
used case studies of Hollywood icons from the golden era, examining
'the ways in which audiences simultaneously construct and consume a
particular star's persona' (Wiki).
You might see parallels here with much later web 2.0 theorists such as
Gauntlett and Gillmor and such declarations as "the former audience"
(see this post for associated material on this).It goes deeper still though, into the weird contract we draw up with ourselves when we watch film. “Tom Cruise is doing that for real!” we exclaim to ourselves as we see Tom Cruise doing some casual rappelling. “Whoa!” We never truly watch blockbusters as pure narratives, but instead are constantly aware in their place in a wider ecosystem of celebrity, in which Cruise also has divorces and jumps on sofas and twinkles next to fans. We’re in awe of Cruise-as-Hunt rather than Hunt himself. (Tom Cruise, Christopher Nolan, and the new anti-CGI snobbery)The excellent MediaKnowItAll site has a useful entry on this, considering not just the film angle but also how the music industry inculcates this approach to its modes of operation:
A star is an image not a real person that is constructed (as any other aspect of fiction is) out of a range of materials (eg advertising, magazines etc as well as films [music]).Their entry is copied in below, but is best appreciated on their site, where you can also click around and find further useful material.
“Where did Renee Zellweger’s face go?”
The post below links into the lesson, but note I've created MANY ... MANY posts on this topic which are accessible through the archive!!! There are even themed links lists down the side of this blog...
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| Gradually being updated - use the tag clouds! |
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| Fragment of a past post on this topic. |
Its not quite an autobio, apparently more of a humour book though framed on his film work... |
| Is Jenkins too utopian, optimistic? [image source] |
We have a real responsibility making films. This was about a really painful period in many people's lives, and we had to keep that thought and not just make choices for audience entertainment.He raises his background - you could usefully compare this to Shekhar Kapur getting the gig for Elizabeth (Indian, no knowledge of the era!), an instance of WT taking a big commercial risk (that paid off handsomely: a $30m film that made $82m and spawned a sequel/franchise).
I'm not your natural choice for this film: my background is French-Algerian, I grew up in London, I'm not even a WASP. But I wanted to focus on the story of the challenges facing young men, not make a political film. It was very important to me to bring out the shades of grey with all the different players, and I made this clear when negotiating with the producers. I have no links to Belfast, it was the screenplay that drew me to this.
Working with television you have much more time to draw out an epic character arc, whereas in film its a mere snapshot and you have to work to make every moment count.
I started working on the initial packshot for ’71 back in August 2014 and the final artwork files have just been sent. It’s rare for me to spend so long on an individual title (unless the delays are due to production issues!).Source: Rogue4 Design.
The Blu-ray and DVD packaging has gone down a slightly different route to the Steelbook release. Although using the theatrical artwork as its base, we wanted to create something that had a more military feel. The colours were adjusted and a new textures were added to the background, giving it the khaki texture. There’s also a little adjustment to the composition in “’71” as well a colour change. Both the Blu-ray and DVD releases have a cardboard o-ring sleeve, which has an overall matt varnish with spot UV gloss. The Blu-ray has a cut down O-ring, which shows the black Blu-ray case at the top.
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| Khaki colourscheme the key to this design |
“The acclaim for Yann Demange’s ’71 comes as no surprise”, said Hugo Heppell, Head of Investments at Screen Yorkshire and Executive Producer on ‘71. “Its selection for Official Competition at the Berlin Film Festival is much deserved recognition for Yann, Angus, Robin and the whole team at Warp. We are immensely proud to have supported Warp over the last ten years and to see it now as the most significant film production company outside London.”
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| Jay and Silent Bob in Clerks; they've inspired a shoe range! |
Filmmaking is the only art form where you say, "I wanna express myself. Give me $10m and Ben Affleck." ... But all along what I could do was talk. If podcasts were movies, I'd be up there with Spielberg, dude.
For a film-maker who created the iconic/cult characters Jay and Silent Bob, and who has two decades of film-making behind him, that's quite a statement.If it was now, I would have seen Slacker and written a blog about it or recorded a podcast. That would have been enough. The entire message of my career is that if you want to do it, you should try. I am a chimp and I built a career out of making films. And I don't even consider myself a film-maker! Oh yeah, and PS: neither do the critics.
Read a Biskind interview here.
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| The mini-tour even has an official sponsor! Screenshot from seesmod.com. |
the rise of Amazon and the Kindle is transforming the nation's publishing institutions, which are being forced to seek new sources of revenue. As bookshops close, authors are embarking on rock star-style tours; the newly formed mega-publisher Penguin Random House sold 10,000 tickets for a reading tour by Caitlin Moran. The publisher is also turning one of its most famous characters, Peter Rabbit, into a cartoon and is seeking tie-ins with toymakers and chocolatiers.(from this article on eBooks set to overtake print books by 2018)
Some publishers are looking at diversifying into new forms of content, for example by combining books, films and games into a new narrative genre. A new iPad thriller called The Craftsman, launched last year, turns the reader into the main character in a gothic, cinematic chiller.
