AS Media Evaluation - Question 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your product and why?

For our film, we debated on mainly, not deciding what studio it will distributed by, but rather if it was an independent film or a mainstream, ‘Hollywood’ film. About 10 years ago we probably would have gone with an independent studio, as the genre wasn’t that popular at the time. The zombie films being made then were mainly cheap, ‘B-Movie’ type films, but as time has progressed, so has the genre. ‘Dawn of The Dead’, ‘Shaun of The Dead’ and ‘I am Legend’ are just some of the examples of films which were picked up by the big name studios. Even then, in 2004 at the time of the ‘Dawn of the Dead’ remakes release, the genre still wasn’t that popular. Zombies just weren’t that scary to the audience anymore, so the genre needed a revamp, which came in the form of AMC’s television show, ‘The Walking Dead’. The ‘Walking Dead’ revolutionized the genre, it made zombies scary again, without even using a lot of zombies, but developing realistic, relatable characters and putting them in positions which seem scary. The show isn’t about killing zombies, but more about surviving in a world where some of the people are as much of a problem as the zombies are. We could have easily made the typical, zombie horror film, and made it more of an independent film, but decided that by making it more realistic and more survival based it would have a better chance of being picked up by ‘Warner Bros’, ‘Columbia Pictures’, etc. These studios might not be known for distributed just films of the zombie genre, but we feel that our film is more than that, and crosses across other genres such as, drama, post-apocalyptic and even has some Spaghetti Western, elements included within the film.

Even if the film was picked up by a big studio, we would still need to promote the film and as it is a new brand, a new franchise, marketing would be an important part of making the film a success. We were looking at various marketing campaigns and saw that the using YouTube for videos other than trailers was a huge success.  20^th Century Fox marketed ‘Rise of the Planet of The Apes’ by created a video of an ape, but did it with a fake account, to make it look like it was real. It created a lot of buzz, some of the audience even thought that it was real, a it meant that the film had a lot of interest from just a twenty second clip. We would like to emulate that sort of thing, creating fake profiles with clips of survivors during the outbreak. This sort of ‘hidden advertisement’ has proven to be popular in the past and it is something which would draw interest from the audience, making them want to see the film without even having to actually mention it, the most unconventional forms of advertisement are normally the most successful.