Audience and Institution Practice Essay

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

“The process of film distribution is incredibly interesting and somewhat complex,” Jonathan Paul said in his Hollywood film distribution article. Marketing plays an important role in the success of a movie. Major movies use some of the following techniques to market a movie; synergy, cross media convergence, and cross promotion. 

Synergy is a common use of marketing in big Hollywood films. One of these films is ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald’. This film was produced by Warner Bros. Pictures, a big Hollywood production company. Warner brothers teamed up with AT&T to use synergy to their benefit. This boosted the film and created major publicity. Another film that used synergy was ‘Beauty and the Beast’ produced by Walt Disney Pictures. ABC and Walt Disney pictures teamed up in promoting this release, by having some of the stars from the movie host a special edition of ‘The Bachelor’. Both of these large Hollywood production companies use of synergy to market out their newest films, attracted more of an audience allowing an even greater success. 

Cross media convergence is another great way for producers to market their films. Not only did ‘Beauty and the Beast’ get marketed by synergy, but Walt Disney Pictures also used cross convergence to get people interested in their upcoming film. Disney teamed up with twitter, allowing exclusive ‘Beauty and the Beast’ themed stickers to be added to photos. Walt Disney Pictures also played the 1991 animated version more often on tv, to generate excitement for the newer film. Seeing how well known this film is, Walt Disney Pictures definitely used this marketing strategy wisely.
         Cross promotion also helps Hollywood films get on the audience’s radar through marketing. ‘Black Panther’ a film produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Motion Studios, used cross promotion. The trailer was debuted during an NBA finals game. This meant many people would be watching, increasing audience intrest. ‘Fast and Furious 7’ is another big Hollywood film that used cross promotion as a marketing technique. Fast and Furious was under the Universal Pictures production company. They teamed up with OPPO, a phone brand featured on some of the movie posters. Both of these top Hollywood movies were a success and one common denominator is using cross promotion as a marketing strategy. 

As shown by the four Hollywood films mentioned (‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Black Panther’, and ‘Fast and Furious 7’) marketing helps them through their success. They all use many of the same marketing techniques such as, synergy, cross media convergence, and cross promotion. I feel that marketing is one of the most important factors when distributing a film.  

CCR

Commercial

This was my first project in my AICE Media Studies class.

Music Video

Re-Edit minus one

 Today two of my other group members and I met up to edit our footage from our reshoot. One of our group members did not show up. Can you guess which one? If you guessed the same one as the last 4 times you got it! Her excuse for not coming was that she was "sick" and was on quarantine. However her social media posts say something different. Even though Lucy wasn't there, we were still able to complete almost our entire project. Besides a few minor changes that still need to be made. We started the editing process by finding the music.  We went to a website that was a royalty free music finder. We downloaded the music and imported it into iMovie. Placed it under our footage panel to insure that it would be our number 1 sound. We began by placing each video in order of our storyboard. This created a rough copy of our footage, before fixing and cleaning up the film. We then trimmed the footage, cut, and removed, to insure the best fit for the overall meaning and concept of our film. When we began to add titles we noticed how they didn't come out as we wanted and noticed some minor issues that needed to be fixed. We decided to fix them tomorrow and for now, just start planning out our CCR.

Re-Film minus one

Today we did our re-filming. As you can see by the title, one of our teammates didn't come to help re-film. Since we never actually filmed, this was technically just our filming. We filmed at birch state park. It is on the water and is filled with nature trails. So we felt this would be a perfect spot to film given our films plot. I got to the park early because I wanted Chick-Fil-A breakfast and they were about to stop serving it. So I sat in my car and waited for my teammates, Montana was late ofc but we all anticipated that. So after we all met up in the parking lot, we went on a search to find the best place to film our first scene. I think I played a big role in deciding which areas we should film, because I had been to the park before so I knew if there was a better area. I also helped Montana with filming and directing because I edited the film we put together for the peer review so I knew what parts looked bad and what looked good. This way we didn't make the same mistakes we made the first time. 

I feel like today was productive. Even though we were only out there for a few hours, we still got every scene we needed, except for one. The one scene we didn't get was a POV scene and I was recoding it and I kept accidentally stopping and starting the video. So we got clips of before and after each take, for this scene. We didn't notice until after we left that we didn't get the whole thing. Other than that all of our other scenes came out fine. So I would call today a good day.