FDA UK Distribution Guide and Questions on Film Distribution

1. What is meant by the term film distribution?

Getting a film to the largest scale audience it can reach by attracting the audience.

2.What does a film distributor do?

They look for certain features of the film that for a well suited audience it would be marketable. Also, what is important is the 'local' product. Audiences are naturally more accepting of films from their country, as a example, English people are more inclined to warm to a English film. 

3.How does reach relate to film distribution? 

For a film to reach a wide audience, what helps is for the films marketing has a good spread as well as the frequency of products they produce. However, this costs a lot of money, so there will need to be a definite profit of the film at the end.

4.What is meant by the distribution plan?

How and when to release a film to therefore maximise chances of success. Market knowledge is gathered as well as commercial experience, with statistical evidence to gain information resulting in release dates of the film. The film distributors can then prepare a budget for how much they can spend on marketing and production for it once they estimate how much it will earn.

5. What is meant by the marketing plan?

The create awareness and publicity for the film, the marketing plan is put in. This is done by finding the most popular ways to get attention of a specific audience. For example, Adverts on reality tv shows are more likely to get a younger audiences attention where as a advert in a newspaper is more likely for older audiences because they are more likely to be reading it. Ways of marketing the product can be through trailers, posters and online sources.

6. What is the difference between advertising, publicity and promotion? 

When companies pay for their product to be put out to the audience, this is advertising and it is done to establish awareness of it. It can be done through billboards, magazines, tv adverts, radio etc. The company pay for aspects such as the size of the magazine advert to how long the tv advert is. As a example the new Hunger Game films had Mocking Jay paying money for advertisement.  The idea of promotion is to build sales short term rather than long term that advertisement brings. Promotion can allow the audience to interact with the product, for example merchandise and press releases. What is gained from the advertising and promotion of the product is what is called publicity. The is gained from appearances of the films cast in the public and doing interviews. It is said to gain the audience even more that the advertising of the film. This is because it has more of a personal nature, for example of well known chat shows with other popular celebrities such as the Johnathan Ross show. Overall, it makes more profits in sales making it more popular to the public.
7. Find and teaser poster, teaser trailer, main poster and main trailer for a horror film and put them on your blog- Who was the distributor and how many countries was it released? Can you find how many screens it was shown in on the opening weekend?




                    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb-jRz7HWqs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k10ETZ41q5o

The Conjuring was distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures and was released in 49 countries. In its opening weekend in the USA this film was shown on 2903 screens.