Audience and Institution Practice Essay

1. 1. Assess the importance of marketing in the media area you have studied. 

Marketing is one of the most crucial aspects of releasing a theatrical film. Marketing can determine how well your film will do at the box office. This makes perfect sense in that if people don’t know about your film, they obviously won’t go and see it. The same thing applies if you do have lots of marketing, but it’s bad marketing. Three common techniques are used to promote films. These are cross-media advertisements, merchandising, and putting out your trailer on television.  

Cross-media advertisements are beneficial in multiple ways. They not only promote your film but help to promote another product as well. Take the 2018 film, Black Panther, for example. The car company Lexus paired up with the movie to promote their new 2018 Lexus LS 500. The car appeared in advertisements for the movie and the characters in the movies appeared in commercials for the car. The car even ended up in several scenes in the actual film itself. This helped to sell more of the new car, while the film benefitted from it because they were paid to include the car in their film and advertisements. Another example of cross-media comes from another Marvel film, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2. The ice cream and fast-food chain Dairy Queen paired up with the film to promote their ice cream, or more specifically their signature product, the Blizzard. The Guardians of the Galaxy logo and characters were printed on the cups and the film even got a Blizzard flavor made in its honor. The results of this cross-media were like the cross between Black Panther and Lexus.  

The second technique films use for marketing is merchandising. The creation of toys or other products such as clothing can help to promote your film. Some examples of merchandising in the film industry are Jurassic World and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The film Jurassic World is a sequel/reboot to the Jurassic Park trilogy. Due to the film being centered around dinosaurs, it made sense to create and sell lots of dinosaur toys for the film. These toys would not only bring in tons of sales for the company but could promote the film as well. Parents who buy the toys would likely also want to see the movie that the toys are based on, therefore increasing box office sales. For the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a prequel to the Harry Potter film series, merchandising was used for clothing and jewelry. Stores like Hot Topic were given the right to sell Fantastic Beasts inspired shirts, hoodies, and other articles of clothing. On websites like harrypottershop.com, you could buy jewelry that was inspired by jewelry characters wore in the film. This type of merchandising worked pretty much the same way as Jurassic World’s did. The company got increased profits from these sales while also having their film promoted.  

Last, companies use trailers and commercials to promote the films to audiences through television. Universal Pictures is the company behind the major film franchise, Despicable Me. The franchise is so big that a spinoff movie called Minions was created, which focused on the little yellow characters that were always with the main character of franchise, Gru. The trailers for the film were very crucial in bringing about the film’s box office success. The film’s trailers were featured in commercials for shows like “The Voice” and the trailer was even shown in a Super Bowl commercial. All these advertisements in major television led to the film making about $115.2 million dollars its opening weekend, which was huge for an animated movie. It’s safe to say that the all the trailers and promoting on television this film had is what helped the film reach that box office success.  

Overall, marketing in films is very essential in creating greater profits and box office success. Cross-media allows film companies to not only promote their own film, but to promote other products as well. Merchandising creates another opportunity for profit while still promoting a film, and trailers and commercials on big television channels and programs help to increase your opening weekend box office revenue. Without good marketing, it would be difficult for a film to make its way and survive in the industry.  

Game of Thrones Extract Essay

CCR

 After each film project that we do for AICE Media Studies, we do a CCR. For the commercial, the CCR was just answering the questions. For the music video, the CCR was a PowerPoint, but we still had to answer the questions through the PowerPoint. This time around, we had to make a CCR for the final task, which was a two minute long film introduction. For this CCR had to be a 12-15 minute long video and had to answer all 4 questions. These questions are the same four questions we've had for every CCR, however this time I had to put an extreme amount of thinking into them. This is due to how long the video has to be. The CCR is also supposed to be creative, so my initial idea to be creative was to do an interview style video. I didn't have anyone to interview, so I interviewed myself. I dressed up in two different outfits to make this as clear as possible. This was somewhat strange to do, but I think it ended up working pretty well. In terms of answering the questions, I realized that each response had to be about three minutes long in order to reach the minimum time, which was 12 minutes. Filming the CCR didn't take very long, and I didn't find it to be too difficult. The hardest part came in editing the footage together to create one cohesive interview. It was a very time consuming process. To make the CCR even more exciting, I added in clips from my film introduction. This helped to provide context to what I was talking about in the interview. I think I did a pretty good job at this. At the end of my CCR, I decided to have some fun with it. I had the interviewer ask questions that I came up with after the 4 essential questions were answered. This made the interview more friendly and lighthearted, which reflects back to the filming process, which I found to be very fun and enjoyable. I believe that's the best part about AICE Media Studies. You get to learn a lot and gain hands on experiences while also having fun doing it. When I finished with the CCR, I had to upload it. This was tricky due to the file being so large. Eventually, I figured I could just upload it to YouTube in order to embed it to my blog.

Final Task - The Film Intro

  The last film project we were assigned for our AICE Media Studies class was to create a two minute long film introduction. We could make the introduction in any genre we wanted to, as long as it left the audiences wanting more. Before choosing our genre, we did lots of research on genres. Then we were tasked by our teachers to come up with three different plots for three different genres. One team member came up with a romantic comedy film, another came up with an adventure film, and I came up with a thriller film. We decided to make the thriller film that I had pitched, as it would be the best in leaving the audience to want more. We also chose the thriller because thrillers are good for cliffhangers and thrillers are one of our favorite genres to watch in general as a group. We also researched the art of titles in film introductions, as we would have to incorporate them into our project. After this, we started our storyboard. As a group we modified the story to the point where we felt it was really good. We made sure the story made sense and that you could create a full length film off of it. Next we started to think about what cool and unique shots and angles we could incorporate into the film. Like the other projects, I assumed I would be given camera duties. However, this was not the case and another team member and I actually split up filming duties. Now that we had all the planning ready, it was time to film. We decided to film at one of the group members' houses and also at a park by his house. We brought in a friend to act and drive us around, as he had a car and a license. Our antagonist needed to be able to drive, so he was the perfect candidate. This was easily the most fun shoot that we have done this year. We focused really hard to make it as good as possible and we even had some fun while doing it. When it came to the editing, I was in charge of putting the clips together, as well adding in music and sound. Overall, this was by far my favorite project out of the three.

Music Video

The second project we had for our AICE Media Studies class was a music video. We could choose any song as long as it was appropriate and we could work with anyone we wanted to in groups of up to four. Of course, I worked with the same group I had worked with for the commercial. It took us a lot of thinking, but we finally decided to use Rock Lobster by the B-52's for our song. We realized we could incorporate a lobster into the song and thought it would provide some humor. The next step we took was to make our storyboard. This time, I did the drawing with one of the other team members, even though I'm not the best at drawing, but I think I did pretty good. After all of our planning it was done, it was time for the most important part: filming. This had also proved to be the most difficult part. At the time, all four us were super busy with school, extracurricular activities, and family life. For example, it felt like every night I had band practice and the other members of my group had swimming practice (the other three are all on the swim team). We realized we were running out of time to film, as the deadline was approaching sooner and sooner. Finally, we all decided to skip our practices and film after school one day. We made this decision because this is a school assignment, and school work should come before extracurricular activities. After settling this out, we agreed on our shooting location. We knew we wanted to film at a beach in order to really incorporate the lobster theme into the music video. We decided to film at the first life guard post at Fort Lauderdale beach since we all live close to that area and since it is a public beach. This is when we ran into another problem though. One of our team members had to go out of town with his family the day we were supposed to film. This was such a big problem because he had our camera, tripod, and SD card, which were essentials for filming. We decided to still film because we couldn't reschedule at that point. Now we had to improvise, so we used my iPhone 8 to film the entire thing. This was very unusual and we wondered if it would even work, however it thankfully did. We didn't incorporate that many new types of shots into the film this time. They were mostly the same as in the commercial. The editing was also very minimal as well. All we did in that department was add the song Rock Lobster to our footage.

Commercial

  The very first project we had for our AICE Media Studies class was a commercial. I remember we could choose from a list of companies to make a commercial on and work in groups of up to four students with whoever we wanted. The group I worked with for this project is who I worked with for every project we did. This project was significant in that it was my first hands-on experience with film making. For this project I was the one behind the camera. I never really saw myself as an actor, but camera work sounded fun and I was excited to start filming. We had started with the storyboard and we had came up with a story that we liked. I was then in charge of coming up with the shots and angles we would use to execute that story. When it came to this, I looked my list of film terms that I wrote in class when we took notes. I realized that there was a lot of terms and it would be challenging to incorporate a lot of them into the commercial. In the end, a lot of these shots and angles were cut out of the final project due to the time limit, which was 30 seconds. In the end we had a mid shot, a high angle, a wide shot, a zoom, an extreme close up, a long shot, and a two shot. A lot of what we planned in our storyboard for the commercial didn't end up coming to fruition. This was mostly because we had a very limited amount of time to film. Due to this we just couldn't film some of things we wanted to do. However, this may have been good since we had to cut out over 35 seconds of footage to get the commercial within the time limit anyway. When it came to editing, it was very simple, surface level stuff. When we got to the computer, the hardest part was putting clips all together to create one cohesive film that was under the time limit. I was mostly in charge of cutting shots out and proved to be very difficult, since I had to decide which shots were more important than the others. After this, we added some music to make the commercial more exciting. Last, we added the smoke effect that you see when one of the characters eats a spicy chicken nugget from Wendy's. Overall, this was a great project to get us kick started into the world of film making.

The Future is Uncertain

   Recently, the state of Florida has gotten news of what will happen regarding the schools. The Coronavirus outbreak has spread rapidly throughout the state and has caused many changes this past week. This is especially true in my county, which is Broward county. Our governor has announced that school is cancelled until April 15. This is not good news for our film project. I am certain that re-shooting will no longer be possible at this point. The risk of contracting the virus is too high. We can try to get together but I doubt that our parents would actually let us get together during this outbreak. Besides, we wouldn’t to potentially spread the virus to each other as well. This leaves us with two options. The first is that one person re-shoots scenes at their house and it’ll only be them. The problem with this, however, is that the scenes we need to reshoot include multiple character so this would not workout at all. It would also not workout for consistency of the setting. The second option I think is much better and much more practical. This option is just taking the footage that we already have and editing it up to make it work better. This option’s problem is that one of the scenes that needed to be reshot was very dark. This means that the lighting was too dark to really get a clear sight of what was happening. This was not our fault though and the problem could have been avoided if we filmed quicker. What had happened was that the lights in the park we were filming in had shut off on us leaving us in almost complete darkness. This is not something we can go back and edit to fix. We would have to reshoot it entirely. However, I still believe option 2 is a lot better than option 1.


This is a picture of that dark scene.