Unit 8: Understanding the Television and Film Industries - Task 4 - Timeline

The technology of the Film industry has been growing since the late 1800's. A huge amount has happened in that time and this timeline a summary of everything that has happened so far:

1889
The first ever motion picture camera is commissioned by Thomas Edison and built by William Dickson. It is named the Kinetograph.

1894
The first ever motion picture studio, the Black Maria, is built as well as the first Kinetoscope parlour where people can go to watch films.

1895
The Lumière brothers invent the Cinematograph, a combination between camera and projector. They held the first ever private film screening.

1905
In Pittsburgh, the first ever movie theatre is opened.

1910
Thomas Edison introduces the Kinetophone, an early attempt at a sound recording device.

1911
The first feature film, Enoch Arden, is made by D.W. Griffiths and screened for the first time.

1922
Power of Love, the first 3D film, is released.

1924
Walt Disney releases the his first animated film and the first of his 'Alice' comedies, Alice's Wonderland.

1927
The Jazz Singer is released which is the first feature length film with synchronised sound.

1935
The first all colour feature length film, Becky Sharp, is released.

1937
Walt Disney's first feature length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, is released. It is the first fully hand drawn feature length animation.

1941
In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles redefines the medium of film by subordinating all previous technological and cinematic accomplishments to his own cinematic vision, using newly developed film stocks and a wider, faster lens,

1953
Hollywood develops wide-screen processes such as CinemaScope.

1955

1960
The Academy awards Ampex with an Oscar for technical achievement.

1964
Red Desert makes great use of the recently perfected zoom lens, which increases the optical mobility of a shot.

1976
Rocky is the first film to incorporate the use of Steadicam.

1977
Star Wars is released and uses new, ground breaking special effects.

1990
Computer-based non-linear editing systems are introduced and begin to dominate post-production.

1995
Toy Story is released and is the first completely computer generated feature film.

2009
Avatar uses 3D heavily and causes it a rise in popularity. The film also uses many other ground breaking special effects no other film had used before.

Director of Photography Showreel 2015/2016

Unit 8: Understanding the Television and Film Industries - Task 1 - Case Study

Marvel Studios

Marvel Studios (originally known as Marvel Films until 1996), is an American motion picture studio based at The Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. It was founded by Avi Arad in 1993. It is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios and uses vertical integration as it has subsidiaries of its own such as Marvel Music, Iron Works Productions, Incredible Productions etc. Marvel Studios was bought by Walt Disney Studios in 2009 for a huge $4 billion and since the purchase the company's net worth has grown to a $9 billion, due to the success of the 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' films. They also produce TV shows too such as Agents of Shield and Agent Carter and Netflix Exclusive shows like Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage.


Miramax Studios

Miramax is an American entertainment company known for distributing independent and foreign films. It is head quartered in Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 1979 by the Weinstein brothers, Bob and Harvey. However, in 1993 the company was acquired by the Walt Disney Company. The Weinstein brothers still had a large amount of control over the company despite now being a subsidiary of Disney. The Weinstein's eventually left the company in 2005 and in 2010 Disney sold Miramax to Filmyard Holdings. The company currently has a net worth of £457 million. Since it started Miramax has produced some of the biggest films such as Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, The Aviator etc.

Unit 8: Understanding the Television and Film Industries - Task 2 - Flow Chart

In groups, we made flow charts showing the responsibilities of jobs in the Film & TV industry. Job types were split up among the groups. My group worked specifically on showing the links between roles in Technical and Construction. The photos below show the job roles in these categories and which jobs are higher than others with more responsibility:

Unit 8: Understanding the Television and Film Industries - Task 3 - Contracts

The Contracts in the Film & TV industry are unlike contracts for traditional jobs because of the Industry being so flexible and constantly changing.

Full Time

A full time contract is more similar to a regular job's contract in comparison to, for example, a freelance contract however it is less likely to get a full time contract in the film industry. As it says in the title, someone with this kind of contract would work full time and be permanently attached to the company until the project was finished, working a set number of hours per week. A full time worker always gets company benefits such as pension, sick pay, maternity and holiday leave. Job roles that are most likely to be under a full time contract are managerial, editorial and financial. An example of someone on a full time contract would be someone high up, possibly in charge of the company/project.

Part Time

A part time contract means you work just a small amount of what a full time contract would ask for. Similarly to a full time contract, this contract gives a set amount of hours a week, just not as many. Also in the contract are similar benefits a full time worker gets, just less because of the lesser work hours.

Freelance

Freelance contracts are the most common contracts in the Film Industry. Technical & Creative jobs are most likely to be under freelance contracts. Unlike a full time contract, these kind of contracts are temporary and they will only last for so long. In a freelance contract, the employee might still be entitled to company benefits however it depends on the situation and the company they are working for. However, while they might not definitely get company benefits, a freelance worker gets to be in control of a lot more due to not fully working for the company and just being hired temporarily. An example of someone freelance would most likely be someone in a role such as a Camera Operator.

Confidentiality

Contracts sometimes can contain confidentiality agreements. This is an agreement that the worker signing the contract is bound by law to not speak about or give any information about the project they are working on until further notice or a previously agreed date. This means that the worker giving away the title of the project, any plot details or their involvement is breaking the law as well as a breach of their contract. This is often used on contracts on Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars for example which, even though people knew it was being made, had a huge amount of secretiveness around it with nobody except people working on it knowing the plot until it's release.

Exclusivity

Some contracts contain exclusivity agreements meaning the person signing the contract, by law, is only allowed to work for one company for an agreed amount of time (usually the duration of the project). This means that if the person who signed the contract went to work for a another company during their agreed duration of time, payment can be suspended and employment even terminated as a punishment. This is most likely used on contracts signed by Directors working on a series of films so that they will definitely attached for the production of all of them.

Unit 26: Film Studies - Task 4 - My Relationship With Film

One of the most important parts of a film is its audience. As part of an audience, you interact with the film. A film’s audience can determine its popularity and status in culture. It is almost impossible to create a film for everyone due to the difference between the individuals who make up the audience and the way each single person reads the film and is affected by it.

Spectatorship of a film can be seen in two different ways. Active Spectatorship suggests that audiences are made up of individual active spectators who each are different and will have different reactions to a film. These active spectators are independent in choosing what films to watch and do not just watch what they are told to. Passive Spectatorship suggests that a film audience’s knowledge or life experience has no effect on their reaction or reception to the film they view. Often, film directors actually prefer their audience to be passive. They will put very obvious preferred readings in their films so the audience will react in the way they want. These preferred readings can be conveyed to the audience through choice of music, lighting and cinematography in hope that this would cause a specific emotional response. Some film makers do like the audience to have a more personal response and be active spectators. They sometimes encourage their audience to interpret the film in their own way. However, in bigger Hollywood blockbusters, a preferred reading is usually put forward to the audience and a Director has a specific idea of the plot and characters that they want the audience to understand. A common use of active spectatorship is leaving an open ending to a film. Open endings leave a sense of ambiguity for the audience and allow them to use their imagination rather than being told exactly what happened. An example of an ambiguous ending is Memento. The film finishes by totally changing what the audience thought they knew and leaving them unsure what to think.

Audiences can gain four main types of pleasure from watching a film; personal relationships, personal identity, diversion and surveillance. The most common of these four is probably Diversion, this is because it is the most common reason a person wants to watch a film. Films allow a person to divert from their own lives and escape into another reality. Many films offer huge amounts of escapism to an audience such as, Lord Of The Rings or Star Wars, which take place in other worlds we aren't familiar with. Personal Relationships or Personal Identities are when an audience feel a personal attachment to characters in a film or can relate to the characters. For example, The Inbetweeners movie is very relatable to groups of young 'lads', especially in the UK, as they will have experienced very similar situations. Older men can also relate to it as they can remember being in similar situations when they were younger. Other examples could be 'stoner' movies as 'stoners' will likely relate to the characters and topics in the films due to their lifestyle. Some films fall into the Surveillance type. In these kind of films the audience are often educated because they are watching a film which explores a subject, idea or even culture, for example, that the viewer isn't aware of or familiar with. A lot of foreign films are surveillance because of the look at a different culture. For example, 'Sin Nombre' is a Spanish film which explores gang culture. Anybody from a different country and totally unfamiliar with any kind of gang culture would be educated by this film.


A viewer's response to a film can differ depending on their Media Literacy. Depending on an audience's knowledge of the media and how film works, they can have a different interpretation. For example, some one like me who is a film student will view films very differently to a casual viewer due to the fact that a film student knows more about how a film is put together and how stories work whereas a normal film goer would have more a simple idea and not look into those kind things. An example of the responses differing could be seen with 'Memento'. The film has a non-linear timeline and the audience have to think about how the story pieces together rather than it all just happening chronologically. While someone with better media literacy than others might find that very interesting and enjoy the challenge of piecing it together, someone with less media literacy/a casual film goer might just find the story confusing and boring and they might prefer to see a film which happens chronologically.

Intertextuality is where a film references another piece of media. This includes parodies, spoofs and homages. In parodies/spoofs a film is deliberately referencing another piece of media, usually in a comedic way, sometimes even mocking it. In 'Hot Fuzz' the entire Hollywood action genre is parodied throughout the movie with characters acting in similar ways to popular 'action heroes'. Specific moments from films such as 'Point Break' are also parodied however could also be classed as a homage to the film. In homages, a director purposely references a piece if media in some way in their own film but, unlike parodies, homages tend not to be comedic and are usually meant to show an appreciation for the thing they are referencing.

Pre & Post-viewing experiences and a persons opinion on a film can be affected by different aspects. For example, a person who watched all the trailers a promotion for the film they are seeing might have high expectations and be let down however someone who saw nothing beforehand would have no expectations. Trailers can have a large effect on people experiences with films. Often, in comedy trailers the best jokes are shown to get the best laughs and gain audience however this leads to all the best jokes being heard before the film and the audience being let down. Similarly a trailer can give away too much plot, a problem many people believe to be in today's cinema. A recent example would be the trailer for 'Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice'. With people an audience already gathered from simply the announcement of Superman and Batman being in a film together, you would think there would be no need to give away too much plot. However, the trailers released before the film came out revealed what many considered to be far too many plot points and even giving away twists which, had they not been mentioned in the trailer, would have been very entertaining to an audience when watching the film in the cinema. This, among many other reasons, contributed to overwhelmingly bad reviews from critics and fans alike.

Unit 26: Film Studies - Task 3 - Producers and Their Audience

‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ continues the saga, following Episode III. In this installment ex-Stormtrooper Finn, scrappy desert dweller Rey, and droid companion BB-8 get caught up in a galactic war when they come across a map containing the whereabouts of the missing Luke Skywalker. They soon embark on an adventure that brings them face-to-face with heroes from the past, as well as new villains such as Kylo Ren and the First Order. 


Star Wars: The Force Awakens turned out to be one of the most financially successful films of all time, but how did it manage to gain such a response?

First of all, the producer of the film, Disney, needed to identify the audience. This wasn't difficult due to Star Wars being one of the most well-known franchises in the world. Audience research, for most films, would usually be done by looking at previously released films and seeing what the reactions, interests and preferences of audiences who went to see them were. Next, audience targeting would take place, in which the producer would promote the film to the audience they had decided on. In Star Wars' case, when announced in October 2012, the news was reported worldwide meaning everyone knew and heard about it. The franchise already had its audience figured out due to a previous 6 movies so audience targeting was the priority for this production.

The movie had a huge amount of promotion, mostly due to its announcement in 2012 and the subsequent 3 year build to the release. Having 3 years to promote the film gave the production company a huge ground to work with. In this time they released several trailers, posters, had the cast go on chat shows and held press junkets for journalists to interview the cast, all allowing the film to get a major media presence in the build up.

One example of promotion on a chat show was The Graham Norton Show. On the show, a collection of cast such as John Boyega and Daisy Ridley talked about the film and why people should go and see it. As well as this clips were shown from the film to promote it even further.

A huge event for the film was the premiere in December 2015, a huge event where the film is screened for the first time to the public and there are even more press interviews and more promotion. While many premieres are held before the films general release, this one was held on the same day as the general release. This meant there were no pre-release screenings for critics to review the movie. While most reviews ended up being very positive anyway, having no reviews beforehand meant there was no influence on the audiences response to the movie other than the movie's advertising itself, meaning the audiences attitude to the movie beforehand will have been mostly positive. While reviews would be out as soon as the first day of release, the main target audience the producer was going for were the people who would have gone to midnight screenings or seen the movie within the first few days at least.

Once the film was released and critics reviewed it, they were incredibly positive. This allowed the film to be marketed by showing 5 star reviews and quotes from critics. Quotes such as “Star Wars is back, and this is just the beginning” and describing the film as an “outrageously exciting and romantic return to a world you hadn’t realised you’d missed so much”. While their main target audience probably wouldn't pay attention to this kind of thing, more general audiences seeing such overwhelmingly positive reviews might influence them to go and see them film too.


There was also a huge amount of merchandise to accompany the film such as toys, clothing etc. One product that was a big deal among fans was the Sphero BB8 Droid. This was a miniature, remote control version of the BB8 droid in the movie. It can cost upwards of £90 however sales for the product were incredibly high. This was released before the release of the movie however fans still bought the product anyway. That sums up the attitude audiences had to the film as they were so confident it would be good from what they had seen in the marketing from the producer they ended buying expensive products attached to the film. This also goes for clothing as many of the target audience bought T-shirts with the films logo on it before seeing the film. This was great for the producers of the movie because alongside their marketing, people buying T-shirts and even just talking about the movie was free advertisement.

The marketing tactics of 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' were incredibly successful and, as I previously mentioned, actually led to the film being one of the most successful films to ever be made. The film made $247,966,675 in its opening weekend box office and by the end of its theatrical run made a total of $936,662,225, breaking the all-time domestic record. A large reason for this could be the marketing that accompanied the film and the long time that was spent on it. This film is a great example of the relationship between Producers and audience.