How does the budget of a film of an institution affect the production practises used to appeal to the target audience?

The budget of a film institution affects the production practises used to appeal to the target audience because if a film has a higher budget, it can appeal to a broader audience e.g using higher profile actors to give them a bigger reputation and attracting more of an audience, making the film over-all more successful. For instance, in This Is England, it opened with many clips of historical events of the time (the eighties), which would appeal to the older audience who experienced the eighties. The film focusses on a young actor, who is a likeable character and so appeals to a wider audience again. If the film used bigger known actors it would widen the audience even more, but using unknown actors reactes more realism and makes you feel as if you're watching real life, so this way suits the film more.

Higher budget films can create purpose built sets which are more relevent to the film and make it look more professional and more appealing.

Hot Fuzz was a high budget film, which affected the actors they could hire (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost) which attracted people to it and it used a range of professional sets. The higher budget allowed the film to take on a range of genres like action and comedy, broadening the audience even more.

Dead Man's Shoes however was a lower budget film and did not have the money to appeal as much of an audience. The film would have appealed mainly to British, working class adults as it was based on violence, drugs, working class and swearing, making the age range older and making it unappealing to higher class people.

Low & High Budget Properties

I have learnt that low budget films, to keep their cost reasonable, do not use many/any extras and so the films usually look as if filmed in very desolate areas. Their sets usually have a basic feel and natural lighting is used to avoid having to pay for purpose built sets and special lighting equipment and if they use any special effects, they are usually very basic.

A high budget film invests in extra's and flashy settings (purpose built sets etc). The sets are professional looking and recogniseable actors/actresses are used to widen the 'bullseye', the viewing audience. This gives the film a good reputation and makes people more interested to watch it and people will have a higher expectation of the film.

Working Title & Warp Films Research

AOs
Production Practices to appeal to audiences
Distribution and Marketing strategies to raise audience awareness
New technologies to help target specific audiences
Audience and how they challenge institutions

1. Working title are a British film company that produce feature films and some television productions. Warp films is a sister company to Warps Records which is based in Sheffield. Working title is independent and Warp films is part of a conglomerate with Madman entertainment and they have agreed to make at least two films together in the next three years.
2. The ownership of the company affects the budget of the film because if two companies are working on one film, they can make it a higher budget film or if a company is rich. If the company is not so successful on it’s own then it will have to use a lower budget.
3. Working Title has produced films such as; About A Boy, Atonement, Billy Elliot, The Boat That Rocked, the Bridget Jones movies, Dead Man Walking, Hot Fuzz, Love Actually, Nanny McPhee, Pride & Prejudice, Shaun Of The Dead & Thunderbirds. Warp Films have produced films such as; My Wrongs, Dead Man’s Shoes, Rubber Johnny & This Is England.
4. The film Bridget Jones Diary was produced by Working Title and had an estimated budget of $26 million and made £282 million. The film This Is England was produced by Warp Films and had a budget of £1.5 million and it made £315,000 profit.
5. The production budget of Back To The Future had a production budget was $19 million and the film profit was $381.11 million
6. Working Title get their funds from C4 and BBC and Warp Films were funded by NESTA in their early stages and went on to be funded by the UK Film Council, the National Lottery, FilmFour and regional funding bodies.
7. Because Warp Films budget is quite low, they make short films like music videos etc and they only produce English films.
8. ?
9. The target audience of both film companies are British young adults.
10. The main genre of Working Title films are comedies and family films.

Film Budgets

We researched the film budgets of Hot Fuzz (£8 million) and Dead Man's Shoes which was £723,000

Shane Meadows Interview

Producing low budget films has taught him that you can produce a good film without famous actors, fancy sets and high-tech equipment.
He has learnt that using high established actors isn't always the way to a good film. The characters must fit the character roles and if a high established actor can't do this because of characters the audience may asociate them with, then an unknown actor is a better opetion.
He thought that recreating the 1980's and sticking to a budget was a challenge but he successfully found an old estate in Nottingham to use for his film which wouldn't effect the budget. He had to recreate the look with props and old cars, which he saved money by getting off ebay for roughly £100 per car.
Because the film had to be realistic, natural and domestic lighting was used to capture this, which didn't effect the budget.

LC Fashion Magazine- Preliminary

For our print prelimary, we had to make a school magazine and we decided to base ours around fashion as it is something that we are all interested in. We wanted our magazine to look professional and not tacky. We stuck to a grey, red and white colour scheme and the same font through out. This is to make it look professional and create a familiar and iconic feel to the magazine that readers would recognise.

On our initial mock-up, we decided on our colour scheme and most of the cover stories before hand but not much else. When it came to creating the magazine cover, we decided to have all the text on the right so that the model was completely visable and so was the text. We broke this convention once though with the mast header and we put it behind the cover picture and it slightly over-lapped.

We used these symbols on our page, inspired by GQ and Nylon magazine. They are interesting and break up the text.

Our cover picture links in with the text because it features Ross, the fashion icon we wanted to feature an interview with and this is expressed in one of our cover stories. We edited it to have a faded out coloured look about it to add a professional smooth look to our front cover. We continued these conventions and schemes to our contents page where we featured more photos with the same sort of effect as the cover photo.

From this task, I have learnt how to carry out professional conventions and create them in our own work. I have gained more of an understanding in photoshop and what is involved in creating a magazine cover.

Film- Preliminary

Our task was to film somebody opening a door, walking across the room, another character being introduced and a small amount of dialogue. We achieved this in our film, and we had a narrative about two slightly sinister teachers who want to get a student expelled because of his bad report. Our story board displays the shots in which we used, including zoom, over the shoulder shot, close up and mid shot.



We mostly stuck to our story board but we kept adding things in or taking things out and tweaking to make it better and more professional. We began with an establishing shot of the door and then slowly zooming in as a hand reached to open it. Another establishing shot was used as the door was opened, from the other side. We then used another establishing shot for recognition of the 2nd character, the 1st character walked into the room during the shot,I think the shot would have worked better if we had used a pan shot as we had planned in our story board, but the continuity between shots works well. A pan shot was used as one teacher handed the report to another and then an over the shoulder shot. We did a close up of the school report but around this point the continuity was a little iffy. We then used over the shoulder shots using the 180 degree rule whilst dialogue was exchanged. I think the 180 degree rule works well although once again our continuity could be improved, and we should have been more accurate with the characters positions when editing/filming. We then used a pan shot after the character said "out" and filmed out of the window zooming in on what was outside. We sped up and slowed down the pace of the zoom which we felt added a mysterious/scary twist, and may make the audience anxious, as it went well with the mysterious sound effect.
We filmed the scene a few times and then edited different parts together to get the continuity right. There was some discontiniuty with our props e.g the umbrella which was mainly for humour purposes. We used an effect with the film to give it a higher contrast and edited in the sound of a school bell to indicate to the audience that it is break time at a school, coupled with the food we used in the scene, to add to break time mise en scene. When the door is being opened at the beginning of the scene, we edited in a creak to set the mysterious and slightly sinister mood. We also used sound effects towards the end of the film, which was not on our storyboard, we added mysterious music as the camera zoomed in out of the window, we thought this would be effective as it would make the audience think and set an intense mood about what the teachers plan to do to the student.
During our task I have learnt about how important it is to get the continuity between shots and positions of actors etc completely right. At the beginning of our film, I think the continuity is good but towards the end it gets worse. Given another chance, I would have taken more time and detail getting these things right in our filming so that it looked more professional.