I was given many distributors to choose from but i had to think of why i would pick a particular one in relation to my film. After careful consideration, it soon became apparent that Artificial Eye would suit my production the best. Artificial Eye is a distributor in the U.S. and UK, specialising in foreign-language and art house films.
The company is associated with the Curzon chain of cinemas in London.
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| The logo for Artificial Eye |
Considering that my production is low-budget and independently made (the opposite of the typical blockbuster), i realised that Artificial Eye would appropriately distribute the art-house genre in which my film possess.
Such films distributed by Artificial Eye are Michael (2012), The Kid With A Bike (2012) and We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011).
Interestingly, whilst at Curzon cinema Soho today, i saw many feature films due to be realised by Artificial Eye and they all seemed to relate to my film. Whilst The Kid With A Bike (2012) revolves around the story of a father who abandons his son, Michael (2012) follows a middle-aged man with some quite rare and distasteful characteristics.
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| Not everything is spoon-fed to the audience |
'The film is not merely a chilling insight into the day-to-day banality of evil, but also an unbearably suspenseful and tense drama.' - Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian.
In this perspective, my film very much follows the conventions of this thriller/drama. My film seeks to tell the audience that 'day-to-day' situations holds a 'banality of evil'. Not everything that you see in art-house thrillers is obvious and i want to, like these films, portray a dark and very surreal world.
Today I started to research into other films and see how they attracted their audiences. I looked into other films such as Insidious and although the film's plot is rather different, the techniques the film uses for distribution and popularity is very similar to what i have done. I therefore started by looking to see what their front page of their
website looked like and how they enticed their audiences.
As i looked at the website for Insidious, i notices they presented the genre very clearly. For example, in the picture above you can notice that the genre of horror/thriller is being conveyed which is shown by the sinister facial expression of the boy and the dark colours used as a whole. The creators made people attracted to their production from the use of iTunes and Facebook allowing them to keep the public aware of a film status and progression of the production. Cleverly, they have included 'actual' paranormal sightings/encounters to almost make the genre become reality.
On the left is my homepage to my website for my film, Out of Sight. Rather differently, i opted for a trailer because viewers are automatically drawn into a visual representation of the film as they click on the website. Similar to the Insidious website, i have attracted and addressed my audience by using social media such as Facebook and Twitter as the popularity and use of these media groups are expanding at a rapid scale. I had also come up with the idea of creating tabs at the bottom of the website such as 'About' and 'Media' where the audience can become informed of the plot and media, such as screenshots and more trailers, is available to view. If the viewer clicked on more, then he/she could enter a competition in which 5 tickets to see Q&A at Curzon Cinemas lead by Director Lewis Harland would randomly be won.
Another way in which film makers address their audience is promotion through Facebook. As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users. Film makers therefore see this as an opportunity to expand their ways of distributing their productions. As a result, i used the same technique by creating my own Facebook page based on the movie. I found out that creating a page on Facebook allows the creator to find new members and to create adverts further promoting the film.
