AUDIENCE ADMISSIONS

Today I read an article by Mark Kermode in the Guardian. I noticed that many points that he made in the article are relevant to my own production. Kermode talked about the different ways that the audience watch films and how by just looking at the box office it doesn't provide a reliable idea as to what type of films have become popular during 2015.

My film trailer, A Question Of Identity, is slick, fast-paced and gripping for our target audience (aged 18 or over). My trailer can compete with the current and continuing audience fascination for the high production values because it is a gripping story and has a lot of action and adventure in the film. It can also relate to the current migration crisis in Europe since there are migrants involved in our film, looking for a new home in the UK. Although my film trailer is not as big as other hollywood films such as "The Hunger Games" and hasn't got the luxury of a big budget, I have tried to incorporate as many scenes into the trailer as I can. This will allow the viewer to see many scenes from the film but only for a split second - this will hopefully attract the viewer to watch the film at the cinema. After watching the trailers from Transformers: Age Of Extinction and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 - which, according to Mark Kermode were some of the"most significant movies of 2014", I understand how the editing process is very crucial to make a great spectacle trailer. 

Since my film falls into the category of being a small, independent production it is likely I will bypass the traditional cinema release or having simultaneous release, as Netflix did with Beasts of the Nation. Instead, I will distribute my film online. I will use sites such as Youtube, Netflix and other social media platforms that will allow my target audience to watch my trailer - whether that be at home or at the cinema. In fact, Mark Kermode said "simultaneous distribution is the future. We are moving towards an environment wherein audiences will decide whether to watch a film on the phone, their laptop, their television or projected on the big screen in a cinema".
Films have to have big production values and big budgets to make it to the cinema. Whereas, it is much easier to put your film on Netflix. Mark Kermode states that "with the rise of "on demand" services such as Curzon Home Cinema and the BFI-Player, viewers are becoming increasingly used to the idea that they can choose whether to watch a movie at home or in a theatre". Ben Wheatley's ground-breaking "A Field in England" was released simultaneously across a range of platforms (free-to-air TV, video-on-demand, DVD, cinemas), enabling viewers to decide how, where and when to view the film. Therefore, these "on demand" sites will be useful when distributing my film.

Smaller, independent productions, such as my film, use a range of media platforms to raise awareness of the production. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and the official website for the film are all commonly used social media platforms - many of which are free to use, thus making it very advantageous to distribute the production on such websites. On Facebook alone, over 1.2 billion people have an account. This is evidence that there is huge potential to distribute your film to a wide target audience. This is ideal for those who have small, independent productions. Therefore, I will follow this trend when releasing my film.

Kermode talks about the 'role of women in film', with Geena David headlining a symposium on gender imbalance in the media. Director Clare Stewart highlighted the need to 'support women director's across the chain - not just in development but all the way through to making sure there's equity in opportunities for the films to be screened'. In recent years there has been a development in the presence of women in film. For example, Suffragette is a film all about womens' rights and the previous historical issues about this, much of the cast was female and the production team was also mostly made up of females. Thus, this emphasises Kermodes point, that 2015 was a big year for the role of women in film and how they are becoming more dominant. Other examples include the documentary about Amy Winehouse, which became the highest-grossing British-made documentary in UK cinemas. In my film trailer, we have a predominantly female production team, as well as the story of our film being based on a female character. Therefore, this has better established that many of our audience will be female viewers.

For Kermode, blockbusters, franchises and superhero films aren't the only sort of films that attracted audiences in 2015. Independent cinema and art house cinema also played an important role in the success of films in 2015. Some of the movies that have played the UK independent or 'arthouse' circuit this year are: Celine Sciamma's Girldhood, a vibrant evocation of Parisian banlieue life; Carol Morleys The Falling, Debbie Tucker Green's Second Coming, a suburban British drama with a boldly mysterious quasi-Biblical twist and Suffragette, Sarah Gavron's adaptation of Abi Morgan's empowering script, which open the London Film Festival in early October.

Trends such as animation: more than any other area of movie-making, animation demonstrates perfectly how the old and the new, past and future, can coexist. Aardman's Shaun the Sheep finding a firm foothold in the multiplexes, Tomm Moore's Song of the Sea taking inspiration from the hand-crafted 2D artistry of Ghibli, and Laika studios continuing to blur the line between the physical and the digital with scungy delights like The Boxtrolls, its hard to remember a time when ancient skills and newfangled advances were so intertwined. Inside Out: a possible contender for best film 2016?