FILM INDUSTRY ESSAY: HOLIDAY WORK

Analyse how media institutions are using different platforms to engage with their audiences. 

This essay is a fun one to tackle with a bit of adventure and research for you to do, exploring FB, Twitter, Instagram and film websites. Be adventurous!

The question is about how distributors 'engage' audiences by using a variety of platforms (like social media or other online platforms).

Audience engagement means how distributors reach audiences and interest them.

The mark scheme is below but it is not particularly helpful so I have a suggested ways through.

• State "I have studied the film industry" (or similar).
• Define the scope of the essay - "Distributors engage different audiences using a variety of platforms, including film websites, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, trailers, film posters". Engaging an audience means... / By 'engaging an audience', I understand...
• By the term ‘engaging an audience’, I understand it to mean the process of connecting with an audience, (=involving the audience, inviting the audience to identify with the characters & themes, drawing them in); competing for their attention, triggering audience interest and feedback, offering experiences that the audience want (through social media, facilities, incentives, interactivity); understanding & retaining existing audiences (franchises) whilst attracting new audiences (younger audiences, female audiences for traditionally ‘male’ films; being more inclusive with different kinds of screenings)
• Explain which audiences respond most to online marketing - the trend for younger audiences to be online which even older audiences are taking up.
• How do distributors create an engaging campaign? It's a lot about strategy and a timeline, picking the right release date, creating an initial buzz with a teaser trailer, following it up with individual posters on FB and Twitter, then official trailers, interspersed with other exciting drops, inviting interactive responses. The key to success in your essay is knowing your case studies.
• Decide which case studies best fit here: pick films that have engaged audiences differently through, for example, Twitter (Captain Marvell), trailers (Avengers: Infinity War), viral publicity (Legend). Rogue One: A Star Wars Story engaged audiences with Uber apps + Twitter + augmented reality with Nissan; other partnerships with Lego, Gillette. Ads made with Target engaged female audiences: Target’s “There’s A Rebel in All of Us” ad features three females and one man, each relating how Star Wars makes them feel like they can accomplish anything. 
• Unlike Hollywood studio films which benefit from the synergy available from vertical distribution with its multiple platforms enhancing the distribution's advertising strategies, independent films in the UK film industry works on a smaller scale with different strategies across some similar platforms. A film like I, Daniel Blake, for example set out to appeal to audiences that valued social realism through grassroots marketing. The film's trailers were slower in pace and used tracking shots that followed the characters so that audiences got a 'real life' feel for the harsh realities of life for the troubled characters caught in the benefits system. The use of natural lighting and close-ups showed the characters' emotions and harnessed audience's sympathy. The trailer included praise by Variety and Time Out, lending it the approval of a trusted source. Social media played a part: its FB page had 70,000 likes and the Twitter page 12,500 followers and the hashtag #wearealldanielblake circulated on the internet. The Twitter page retweeted fan messages and reviews, promoting further enagement and making the film feel more personal.
• eOne distributed Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake. eOne harnessed the news agenda via Trinity Mirror's titles to promote it, generating conversation around socio-political themes and positioning it as a must-see film. Typical to Ken Loach's style, I, Daniel Blake contains potent social messages. The challenge was to raise awareness of the release and encourage audiences to go to the cinema by aligning the film’s topical themes with current affairs. Knowing that the film would resonate with Trinity Mirror's editorial news agenda and left-leaning readership, Zenith and eOne embarked on a multi-platform campaign with the publisher. The plan involved giving the main character, Daniel Blake, a voice across Trinity Mirror's many platforms, in contrast to the film where he gets lost in the benefits system and feels his identity fading. In print, masthead and front cover takeovers captured the attention of readers and directed them to a one-off column 'My Britain' – based on the Mirror's weekly series 'Real Britain' – where the character Daniel Blake talked frankly about the issues raised in the film. Digital content included disruptive display advertising to continue the theme across the publisher's multi-platform portfolio. In addition, the campaign also laid on preview screenings around the UK with Trinity Mirror's regional titles giving away 10,000 tickets. According to Trinity Mirror's reader research, nearly 60% of readers recalled seeing the features and said that they would see the film, making this a successful platform for this particular audience and film.
• The distributors used the 'platforming' method with a festival run prior to release including screening at Cannes with the accolade of the Palme d'Or positioned it as worthy; its premiere in Newcastle attended by Jeremy Corbyn (as opposed to London) gave the message that the film was authentic. It also had over 1,000 screenings in a grass roots marketing movement. Thus word of mouth was built up. A 'guerilla' projection campaign had quotes from the film beamed onto buildings in Newcastle as well as the House Of Commons to grab the attention of both news media and passers-by.

 

• Studio Canal, the distributors of the film Legend, exploited social media using viral marketing when they seized on a poor 2 star review by The Guardian film critic Benjamin Lee and on the posters positioned the figures of the Kray twins so that visually it appeared that the film had swept the boards with 5 star reviews. Benjamin Lee tweeted the story and it went viral. His unimpressed review has actually helped Legend go viral just as it received its UK release. His tweet was shared over 11,000 times and seen by over 1.4m people. The “story” was covered by sites including the BBC, Buzzfeed, TIME and Mashable.
• Use your own experiences to support your explanations about current trends. You have made a start on this paragraph.
• Disruptors to the film industry include Netflix who have largely bypassed traditional cinema exhibition by delivering films directly to audiences without a distributor. To read more see this written in 2017 when Netflix was less likely to create individual profiles for a movie. This is because instead of working to drive the very specific action of selling tickets on a particular day, the goal for Netflix is a bit fuzzier: to provide an attractive enough overall catalog of content that maintains current subscribers and converts new ones. Equally, with Netflix there is no place for a poster to be displayed. Because Netflix’s movies, for the most part, aren’t distributed theatrically (the major point of differentiation between Netflix and rival Amazon), these won’t appear in theatre hallways - Netflix have just acquired a cinema, so this may change - and these movies are not released on DVD, there’s no need to create something that can be translated to box art. 
• “Netflix have disrupted the usual distribution system and engage their audiences through subscription with an internal system of advertising and a stream of emails to existing subscribers advertising their latest  addition to their catalogue. I receive notifications on my smart phone as well as recommendations through the algorithms that Netflix uses on their platform.”
• Roma also had a film website www.romathemovie.com (with trailers, social media links, ensemble and individual character posters including those proudly announcing Golden Globe nominations which would engage prestige audiences, Cuaron interviews and Q&A sessions, interactive invitations to 'share your memories of Roma #MyRoma'), 
• Roma also had a FB presence, Twitter #ROMACuaron
• The exam board expects us to draw on theory. Henry Jenkins (who writes about the role of fan production and consumption in the online age, and about participatory culture) emphasises the positive effects of the digital revolution - digital media cultivates online communities and allows audiences to express themselves in positive & creative ways through fan engagement. This could be illustrated by the hilarious fan video for Captain Marvell
• Clay Shirky argues that that everybody makes media and that the media industry is increasingly driven by audience feedback systems. Thus YouTubers can make and distribute content as never before; Instagram and Twitter users can create followings that rival established media broadcasters. Think of all the fan sites and fan versions of films. As digital distribution enables audience feedback with 'likes' and 'shares', viral marketing can be a curse or a 'golden ticket' as Ben Lee found when his 2 star review of Legend went viral for the wrong reasons and 'was spun into movie marketing gold'.
• Shirky: the effects of the digital revolution on film marketing
  

THE AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

Avengers: Infinity War (directed by Anthony and Joe Russo) Disney, released 27 April 2018

FDA Handbook 2019 p.34-35

• Who produced the film? American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics superhero team the Avengers, produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

• Who directed the film? Anthony and Joe Russo

• What other films have they directed? 

• What was the budget? 

• Who stars in it? 

• What other films have they been in?

• What technology has been used to make the film? (What cameras did they use? How was the film edited? What CGI was involved?) 

• How was the film marketed? Which different marketing tools were used?

 • What examples of synergy with other products/merchandise can you find? 
• What examples of cross media convergence can you find? 

• What examples of technological convergence can you find? 

• Where and when was this film released (nationwide, worldwide) and in what cinemas?
• What formats was it available in (digital / 3D etc…)? 
• Who is the target audience?

MARKETING INFINITY WAR

Film website HERE

Official trailer HERE

Trailer 1 here

THE CONNECTED VIEWER

This article is from The Connected Viewer, a business briefing paper published by the British Screen Advisory Council (BSAC). It deals with contemporary viewing patterns: that is, consumer trends.

WHO TURNED OUT THE LIGHTS?

Who turned out the lights? How the decade's final month changed cinema for ever 

Ryan Gilbey The Guardian

Fri 13 Dec 2019 06.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 13 Dec 2019 07.39 GMT

The intensity of audience reception to The Irishman and Marriage Story has knocked the film industry sideways. Suddenly the future has arrived – but is anyone besides Netflix happy?  

he year and the decade are ending and the battle appears to have been lost. On your television, laptop, tablet or smartphone, the evidence is there, cold as a body on the slab: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, two of the most impressively scaled films of the year, are now available to watch at a time of your choosing, or to play in the background while you chat, eat, scroll through social media or ignore them entirely.

These movies have entered our homes without undergoing the traditional cinematic lifecycle: a few months on the big screen, then a further three or four months in limbo before arriving on DVD, television and the repertory circuit, where they will see out the rest of their days. Most people are not willing to wait that long, and Netflix has been instrumental in predicting, shaping and indulging our impatience. It has not merely closed the theatrical release window, but lobbed a brick through it. Tied to that brick is a note that reads: “Welcome to the future.”

It is true that both movies played exclusively in cinemas for just under a month. But if an established titan such as Scorsese can negotiate only a measly three weeks, what hope is there for the up-and-comers in the foothills of their careers? Perhaps the biggest shock is the speed with which the industry has capitulated; after all, it is only four years since Netflix produced its first original movie, Beasts of No Nation.
Last year, there was resistance to the idea that a Netflix film could win a best picture Oscar, and it was widely felt that the backlash against Netflix (led by Steven Spielberg, who argued that films that,after a token theatrical run to qualify for awards consideration, go straight to streaming should not be in contention for Oscars) cost Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma the top prize.
But Roma was an arthouse film, irrespective of its very un-arthouse marketing budget. The same cannot be said of The Irishman or Marriage Story, which have big-name stars as well as a commercial reach and appeal that far outstrips Cuarón’s picture. And if the foreshortened theatrical lifespans of these new movies have adversely affected their standing, either among audiences or the industry, that is not reflected in the breadth of online discussion or the first wave of awards nominations.

The cast and crew of Marriage Story at Netflix’s Paris Theater in New York. Photograph: John Lamparski/Getty Images

Those of us who fancy ourselves as purists about cinema can gripe all we like about films being diminished by the haste with which they have reached our teeny-weeny screens. But when the Golden Globes contenders were announced this week, it was a full-blown Netflix love-in, with 34 shout-outs to the streaming service’s film and TV productions, including 17 shared among The Irishman, Marriage Story (the most popular movie with six nominations), The Two Popes, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, and the Eddie Murphy vehicle Dolemite Is My Name.
Those who argue that it is all for the good of film-making should be reminded that Netflix is now leasing its first cinema in New York City, a single-screener devoted exclusively to its own product, with plans possibly to open another in Los Angeles. It is a move that smacks of “vertical integration” — vertical integration is the practice, outlawed by the US supreme court in 1948, whereby the major studios not only produced movies, but owned and monopolised the cinemas in which they were shown.
It is also hard to take seriously Netflix’s image of itself as the guardian of cinema when it unveiled earlier this year a facility to allow viewers to skim through its content at a variety of speeds. Abridged versions of classic literature once rightly attracted charges of philistinism, whereas the act of concertinaing The Irishman is regarded as a necessary response to a hectic world.

Then again, something else has become apparent in the fallout over Netflix’s desecration of the theatrical experience. People are watching The Irishman and Marriage Story – millions of people, in fact, with many of them discussing and dissecting these films in the sorts of numbers that would have been unthinkable under the old system. In a spirit of generosity, it might be said that Netflix has revived something close to that unifying cultural experience that older viewers will remember from the days of three channels, when everyone would feverishly discuss the previous evening’s Play for Today.
It would be unrealistic to expect a precise equivalent when our consumption is so fractured and dispersed. But if gravitas has been sacrificed in the instant availability of The Irishman and Marriage Story, perhaps gains in accessibility have been made – no need for babysitters, no schlepping to the nearest town for anyone not lucky enough to have a local screen willing to play a three-and-a-half-hour rumination on mobsters and mortality, or a patient, tender divorce drama. The movies are there and they are ours.
Carol Morley, whose thriller Out of Blue was released this year, feels broadly positive about these changes in the viewing landscape. “Streaming is important and a great way to reach a lot more people, so I’m all for that,” she says. “For some of my younger relatives who live nowhere near a cinema and find them expensive to get to, it’s meant that they have access to films in a way they never have before. So there is a democratisation, which is all for the good. But having a film distributed and on in the cinema means it’s guaranteed to be reviewed. It at least has some momentum, and makes some noise, whereas independent films released straight to streaming may not generate any noise at all, and so they disappear. Having a cinema release is like the advert to the film and its later life.”
A new Scorsese was always going to be seen, whichever platform it premiered on, and Netflix, which never releases viewing figures unless it has something to boast about, has been quick to trumpet its impressive success: 26 million people watched at least 70% of The Irishman in its first week of streaming. Less clear is the fate of a film such as Atlantics, Mati Diop’s haunting migrant drama, which Netflix snapped up after its Cannes premiere, neatly bypassing the competition ban on films produced by the streaming service. (This followed the infamous 2017 spat when the jury president, Pedro Almodóvar, made it clear that he would not be awarding prizes to films that were not guaranteed a cinema release – in that case, Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories and Bong Joon-ho’s Okja.) Atlantics began streaming last month, augmented by a limited (but not exclusive) theatrical run. Figures for such a comparatively marginal film are unlikely to surface, which raises a timeless philosophical question: if an acclaimed French-Senegalese film is available on Netflix, where it ends up unflagged and largely unwatched, has it really been shown?

The director Todd Haynes (Carol and Far from Heaven) is less tolerant of streaming than Morley. He tells me he has been so busy finishing his new film, the environmental thriller Dark Waters, that he has only had time to see one movie this year. “And it was The Irishman. On the big screen. I just cannot imagine it having the same impact watching it on streaming. I am very ambivalent about that whole thing.”
For Haynes, the problem extends beyond simply the size of the screen: it is also a matter of plenitude. “I was watching TCM [the film channel Turner Classic Movies] recently – which is one of the reasons to stay alive in the world – but I had it in the streaming version where you can pick from all the movies at once. What’s strange is that I missed actually having it on cable and being presented with a single movie at a time, and enjoying that happenstance of a film just being on: you didn’t select it, you didn’t have to sit there and think: ‘What should I watch?’ You feel a deeper connection to things when they’re not totally being administered by your every whim. And, in a weird way, I think it changes desire. When everything is available at once, we don’t want it any more.”
Russell Brandom, the 35-year-old policy editor at the technology site the Verge, insists that younger audiences don’t think that way. “For young people, the idea of sitting and watching one thing for two hours is just not culturally central,” he explains. “The 20-year-olds of this world are more invested in YouTube and TikTok and that more immediate, less ‘produced’ kind of media. There is a lot more competition for their attention these days and film is not really a medium that is well suited to that. If you’re doing film right, you want some silence, some sense of time stretching out: that’s part of the art of film, and I do think it’s harder to create space for that in the modern attention economy.”

If this promises a future population who will never know what it is to surrender completely to film as a collective and all-consuming experience, then it is also important not to romanticise the reality of cinema-going. Brandom points out that going to the movies can be “a garbage experience. You’re bombarded with 20 minutes of commercials before every film.”
It is easy to see why a 20-year-old – or anyone, for that matter – might stay at home, where their viewing options come with a “skip ad” option in the corner of the screen. And there are pitfalls even for those directors whose work reaches cinemas. “We are always competing for space against the much bigger studio releases with larger advertising budgets,” Morley points out. “You may only get one showing a day at an odd hour. It’s frustrating, but it’s the reality. But I make films for them to have a long life, so I like to think that someone will still be showing them in cinemas and elsewhere in years to come.”
Haynes sounds a more plaintive note. “I keep thinking there’s gonna be a revolt,” he says. “You know, how vinyl came back? People need to say: ‘No, no, we don’t want the end of this. It mustn’t die!’”