Film making

Before making a film, you will need to consider:

-Concept

-Message

-Production Timings

-Audience (Most important)

-Budget

Mainstream- Big film

Niche- Smaller market

Institutions are no longer interested in keeping audience together but in ‘triggering engagement’ in people.

Shift from PUSH media (where producers push media at us and we receive and consume it) to PULL media (where we decide what we want to do with the media and access it in ways that suit us).

People are not making and distributing their own videos much more – gone from a VALUE CHAIN (products are made and distributed to audiences) to SOCIAL NETWORK (Complex system where producers and consumers are mixed up)

Media producers also consider very carefully how that audience might react to, or engage with, their text. The following are all factors in analysing or predicting this placement.

Audience engagement- This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text.

Audience expectations- These are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This particularly applies to genre pieces. Don’t forget that producers often play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations.

Audience foreknowledge- This is the definite information (rather than the vague expectations) which an audience brings to a media product.

Audience identification- This is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitudes or lifestyle.

Audience placement-  This is the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a particular audience and make them feel that the media text is especially ‘for them’.

Audience research- Measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions. Research is done at all stages of production of a media text, and, once produced, the audience will be continually monitored.

Counting audiences- Film figures are based on box office receipts and cinema takings, rather than the number of people who have actually seen the movie. Subtract the production costs of a movie from the box office receipts to find out how much money it made, and therefore how successful it has been in the profit-driven movie business.

Be aware that a film which does not cost much to make such as the Blair Witch Project and takes even a modest amount at the box office can be considered a greater success than a big action movie which cost more, has a bigger set of box office receipts but has a smaller profit margin.