Film Distribution and Marketing

Film distribution is the process through which a film is made available for an audience to access.
A film distributor is a company or individual responsible for the marketing of a film. The distributor can set the release date of a film and the method by which a film is exhibited or made available for viewing.
Reach is the amount of people that get have access to the movie and its adverts. It gives distributors an idea of where to distribute and how much to invest in certain areas and audiences.
 A marketing plan is a business document written for the purpose of describing the current market position of a business and its marketing strategy for the period covered by the marketing plan.
Three aspects of a marketing plan: 1. Advertising
                                                         2. Publicity
                                                         3. Promotions
Advertising is a form of communication in marketing used to encourage or entice an audience into buying a product or service - in our case buy a film or tickets to a film. Forms of advertising: TV, billboards, posters, internet adverts etc. Advertising is a vital part of marketing as it reaches out and targets a specific audience and can even entice people who are not in the target audience to buy the product or service or at least notice the advert to pass on to others.
Publicity is managing the publics perception of a product or service. From a marketing point of view, publicity is a component of promotion and therefore marketing.
Promotion is all about communication. Promotion is the way in which a business makes its products known to the customers, both current and potential. The main target of promotion is to emake sure that customers are aware of the existing products. Promotion is also used to persuade customers that the product is better than competing products and to remind customers about why they may want to buy it.

Final Revised Idea

2/ Masked/

popular, good looking guy, who gets all the girls at college. Some girls at college dont turn up and go missing. Guy tells his mate Jonesy that he is bored of hot girls and that he is going to go for a more 'geeky' girl for a change. He takes her to his house in the middle of the woods. The girl sees a masked man stnading around in various places around the guys house. She warns the guy and he dismisses it and is not bothered at all. Their mate jonesy comes round for a bit and the masked man kills him. The girl is very upset and scared but the guys seems quite calm. You then see the guy being dragged off by the masked killer and taken into the woods. The girl is trying to get out of the woods and as she is running the masked killer emerges from the trees, she starts to back off and walks into the guy she was with. He reveals he was working with the masked killer all along.
       In the trailer the last thing you see is her backing off and backs into a body but you dont see who it is.

Initial Individual Ideas

1. Ollie - Popular guy gets all the girls, girls go missing, guy gets bored of hot girls and goes for a 'geeky' girl, takes her to his house in the woods, she realises he is not normal and he has killed all the missing girls and has to get out before he kills her.

2. Joe - Friends go to the woods for a camping trip, see a masked man one night, then when they wake up one of the friends is missing, they then see the masked man again and he 'kills' another friend. All the other friends notice that the killer came when the other friend was absent so they kill him but it turns out that the friend they killed was working with another friend who he 'killed' and then he hunts them down.

3. Lewis - Group of friends go to a theme park for halloween, just before the theme park closes, they go to a newly opened horror maze, 4 come out and 2 are left in there, they then wait until the closing time of the theme park, theyre still not out so the 4 friends are forced to leave, the next day the 2 friends are still missing and the other 4 realise theyve been killed

4. Steve - Geeky teenage girl/young adult is accidentally invited to a halloween party at the end of the week whilst standing in with the wrong group of people, she then has visions and night terrors of people being kidnapped and brutally murdered by some old man, when she comes to, these people have been reported missing, no one believs her stories, and she is scared that this man will come after her. She does not want to attend the party but is forced to by her friend, and whilst at the party, the killer attacks, killing off the rest of her classmates, leaving her to fight off the killer, being the stereotypical virgin female heroin in the horror genre.

The Representation of Women in Horror Films

Usually in horror films, women are portrayed as the ‘damsel in distress’ and the helpless character being attacked by the killer either for sexual reasons or for committing a ‘bad act’ such as having sex or taking drugs. Traditionally, and throughout horror history, men often take the role of the killer or the hero and the women take the role of the victim. This in some cases is reversed according to Barbara Creed in female roles such as sirens, witches or medusa for example. The women in horror movies are usually attractive, sexually seductive and sexually active.

Horror films tend to follow the rule that the male killer kills the group one by one until he himself is killed by the ‘last girl’. This is featured in the book by Carol Clover: ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’. This suggests that the female is usually the survivor or one who kills the killer therefore giving females in horror power over males, which is feminist ideology. However now with the influence of feminism and modern ideologies women are more successful and therefore the representation of women has changed in horror films to intelligent women who try to figure out who the killer is and stop them rather than be overwhelmed with fear and get killed stereotypically as they were before. For example, the female character in the movie Scream played by Courtney Cox. They take the role of a male hero and take charge of the movie, trying to find the killer and either capture or kill him.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the theory was that the motivation for the killer was derived from relationships with women i.e. a mother, sister of ex-girlfriend. This type of thing can be seen in movies such as Halloween (1978) where Michael Myers is provoked by his sister’s neglect and Psycho (1960) where Norman Bates has trouble coming to terms with his mother’s death and her relationship with him before she died. This shows the female role as the cause of the killings and responsible for releasing a crazed killer onto the world.

The ‘Male gaze’ is mentioned as many people claimed that men who watched brutal, bloody deaths of women were somewhat aroused by the voyeur element of the shots, and this arousal being brought to light because of camera techniques such as angles or lighting. Laura Mulvey suggests that films put the viewer in the position of an ‘appraising heterosexual male’ which present women as an object to be viewed – the audience is made into the main male protagonist who looks voyeuristically at an objectified female.

Carol Clover, the writer of the book: ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’ has many points of feminism in horror, one of them is the audience identification. She questioned who the audience identifies with in the film. It was previously assumed that the males of the audience identified with the male killer. Clover argued the audience rather identifies with the ‘final girl’. This means that the audience identifies with the fear of being attacked as opposed to the satisfaction of the killer as he kills people or sneaks up on them. Secondly, Clover mentions the gender fluidity or repressed sexuality of the murderer. There are some examples: Freddie Krueger raped children before he was burned, and Michael Myers kills because of his jealousy of his sister having sex, and uses a phallic symbol in the form of a knife to deal with his repressed feelings.
Jeremy Tunstall argued that the existing research on gender representation found that representation of women in the media highlighted womens; deomestic, sexual, consumer and marital activities to the exclusion of everything else . Women are portrayed as housewives, mothers and sex objects. This is supported by the movie The Shining in which the Jack Nicholson character works at the hotel and the Shelly Duvall character is a housewife who looks after her house and her son.

My preference of the critics and the one i agree with most is Carol Clover. This is because  i think that the audience never sides with the killer as most people relate to the survivor and the 'final girl'. They identify with the fear of being chased or killed rather than the enjoyment of watching someone being stalked or killed. I do not agree with the male gaze theory by Laura Mulvey as personally i do not become aroused when a woman is brutally murdered and i disagree with anyone who says they do unless there is a background of deep mental problems.
 A video of a typical female death scene in Scream
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3_sdD1ecmg&feature=player_embedded

4 Narrative Theories Applied to The Crazies

The Crazies IMDB LinkTodorov
At the beggining of the film there is a shot of the town in flames and buildings destroyed so straight away the theory is defied. Todorov's theory states that a movie starts with a state of equilibrium, and obviously it does not in this movie. There is a state of equilibrium after this as it goes back in time from the flashforward, where everything is ok, then there is the disruption of equiilibrium in the form of the infected crazy people, then the death of the infected people except two, which is not a real restoration of equilibrium.

Levi-Strauss
the binary opposites are:
Sane/Insane - The 'Crazies' are the insane zombie people, and they are the main enemy of the uninfected, sane humans.
Living/Dead - There are a number of people that are killed by the crazies and a number of crazies that are killed by people. The story centres around the living survivors.
Day/ Night - The danger of the dark and shadowy locations at night and the limited view as opposed to the safety and security of being able to see well in the day time.
Military/Civilian - The army and special forces deployed were important and in the know as opposed to the ordinary people who dont know what is going on and are expendable in the view of the military
Known Unknown - The secret surrounding the appearance of the crazies and the crashed plane carrying a bio weapon, we dont see much of this in the movie, rather we are similar to the main civilian characters who dont know anything about it but are just caught up in it.
Infected/Uninfected - The crazies are infected and go insane and the uninfected people have to survive and defend themselves against the crazies, also the element of infection at the end when the two main protagonists are walking to a nearby city and the recon plane shows a message which basically says to contain the threat the same way they did the last time by nuking it.

Propp
The Hero: The hero is David the main character as the story follows him and he stands up for what is right and good.
The Villian: Could be argued that the main villian is either the crazies or the U.S military as the military created the crazies but the crazies are bad
The Donor/Helper is Russell the Deputy of David. He fights for the same cause as David but is not as influencial as him, he is almost a sidekick.
The False Hero: The Mayor of the town is the flase hero as he appears to care for the town but he refuses to cut off the water supply for what seems to be a logical reason in expenditure but he is revealed to be ignorant because he doesnt listen to David who warns him of the infectious water. 

Bordwell & Thompson
The cause and effect relationship of events in the movie:
the plane crashes in the town's water supply, people get infected, people go crazy, the crazy people kill the normal people, the crazy people get destroyed by a bomb.
most of these events have screen time, we do not however see the plane crash, the development of the bio weapon or what happens to the city they go to at the end.

Horror Trailer Analysis - Shaun Of The Dead

Shaun Of The Dead

D.I.S.T.I.N.C.T Analysis

The setting is clear in the trailer as the is a pub, people houses and gardens. It is obviously a suburban area. This is a good setting for a zombie movie as there are lots of familiar zombies that Shaun and Ed recognise and lots of people who live in the surounding area have the potential to become zombies. Also because of the urban area there are lots of building and cars that all have the potential to be a big part in the movie, in this film particularly, the pub.
Technical Codes in the trailer display the comical nature of the film. The sound at the start seem the sound and look like an orthodox zombie trailer with the deep, stern voice of the voice over, and the static of the clip editing, with lots of background noise, in addition to the quick takes of zombie faces and ambulances. The editing freezes shots that are funny or important, which highlight the main plot of the movie. Towards the main, middle part of the trailer the clips are shorter and cuts smaller, as well as the music getting faster to confirm the horror aspect even though the clips themselves are often humourous. There is a particularly good sequence in the trailer where a track shot is used to follow Shaun approaching a flat block battering zombies with a cricket bat.
There are many obvious examples of iconography in the clip. For example you would expect to find deserted cars in the streets, asynchronous sound of glass smashing or screams, and blood trails and stains on the floor etc. You would expect to find these things in a zombie movie and the iconography in the trailer illustrates clearly that the audience is going to see some sort of zombie movie.
The Narrative is somewhat unclear from what the trailer shows. We do however, know a list of things; We know that it is a zombie/comedy film, we know that the protagonist is Shaun played by Simon Pegg, we know that Shaun is accompanied by his best friend Ed and various other characters. We also know a variety of locations and scenes from the movie such as Shaun and Ed's house and the Winchester pub. What they do in movie as far as the plot is concerned, is relatively vague. We know they have to leave their house because of a zombie break in and that they go to the pub at some point, but the rest of the trailer shows humourous clips and memorbale moments.
Characters are clearly shown in the trailer, at least the main ones are. Shaun is displayed as the main character, hence the title 'Shaun Of the Dead'. Shaun's best friend Ed is also shown as another protagonist character. The other characters are briefly shown but not elaborated upon. We see David, the man with glasses running from a pack of zombies, we see liz, Shaun's girlfriend (unknown from the trailer) and flashes of a few other characters and zombies.
Themes in the trailer are definitely comedy and irony as there are a few humourous clips in the middle of a zombie apocalypse which could definitley be perceived as irony. Also, underreaction is a theme of the trailer as there are clips where Shaun and Ed underreact to extreme situations, for example, when they run over a zombie and stop, ask if he's alright and when the zombie gets up shaun is releived they didnt kill him.
There are multiple binary oppositions in the trailer, for example:
undead and alive - zombies trying to kill humans and vice versa
safety and danger - safety in Shaun's house and the danger of outside
attack and defence - the cricket bat Shaum kills zombies with and the barricade in the pub
normal and abnormal - Shaun and Ed's normal life of going to work and playing video games etc. which turned to fighting through the streets for survival against zombies.

Horror Trailer Analysis - Scream

The movie: Scream is a unique movie mixing the fear of a horror movie and the tongue-in-cheek humor of a comedy. I, and I assume most people, would class Scream as a spoof, although it could be seen as a comedy-horror hybrid.
The trailer itself does not imply or involve any humor as such, despite the voice over maybe being a little sarcastic or over the top. It seems to be a normal, orthodox horror trailer with the fast paced takes and cuts, music etc. My immediate impression of the trailer was at the beginning, it could have been any genre, with the girl on the phone. It is then revealed to be a horror or thriller trailer of sorts when he asks the girls name because he wants to know who he's looking at. This shows that the person on the phone is likely to be an antagonist or villian. I also thought that through the main part of the trailer that they concealed the killer quite well, showing his mask only in flashes and a few seconds. If I had not seen the movie, I imagine that would have enticed me to see it.
From what the trailer reveals, the story of the movie is an obsessed horror movie fan who decides to make his own horror movie situation. From footage, there is a character who also is a fan of horror who tells everyone about what happens in horror movies and the conventions of a killer in a horror movie. This gives a slight humorous edge to the trailer and grounds the idea that the movie doesnt take itself too seriously.
The trailer has lots of tools to make the viewer go and pay for the movie. For example, the audience must be aching to see who is behind the mask, why they choose to kill and how it all ends. The trailer slowly leaks the story and gives just enough information on the plot to entice the viewer, and then the information feed stops and the viewer is left wondering about the movie.
There is one big movie star: Courteney Cox. This is a big driving force behind the trailer as she has a lot of screen time despite being somewhat of a minor character in the film. It shows that the movie has good funding and has caught the attention of a popular hollywood actress which could in turn, catch the attention of a lot of potential viewers/buyers.
Finally, the editing of the trailer reinforced the overall tone of the trailer with the half-serious voice over and the super imposed 1950s style titles. This makes sure the audience know it is a horror movie but has an underlying theme of subtle humor.

4 Narrative Theories Applied to Halloween

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077651/
Tzvetan Todorov
Todorov suggests that stories begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potentially opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in a chain of series. Problems are then solved so order is restored.
In Halloween, at the beginning there is a very brief state of equilibrium before someone is quickly killed. Equilibrium is then restored as Michael Myers is put in jail a few years on. This peace is then swiftly ruined again as Michael Myers escapes from jail. Events transpire, people are stalked and killed and then Michael Myers appears to be killed. Equilibrium is thought to be restored, only seconds later in the film, Michael Myers is gone and back out on the streets roaming the world, free to stalk and kill whoever he wants.
Therefore, the movie Halloween, actually goes against virtually every aspect of Todorov's theory as the equilibrium is not fully restored at the end of the film.

Vladimir Propp
Propp looked at 100s of folk tales and identified 8 character roles and 31 narrative functions. I will state the character roles and then state whether or not they are in Halloween and if so, who.
The Villain: Michael Myers, the main character and killer
The Hero: Laurie, the female protagonist
The Donor: Michael Myers is the only character who has anything supernatural about him, as he appears to be immortal.
The Helper: would be the Dr. Loomis character as he is on Laurie's side but has a smaller role.
The Princess: there is not really a sought for person or a reward as such
Her Father: N/A
The Dispatcher: in a metaphorical way, insanity sends Michael Myers on his kill spree
The Fasle Hero: Michael Myers has no one who is on his side, everyone is against him so there is not a fasle hero.
Therefore Propp's theory does not fit very well to this particular movie.

Claude Levi-Strauss
Levi-Strauss looked at binary oppositions in movies - sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of media texts. Some binary opposites in Halloween could be:
Good and Evil
Mortal and Immortal
Face and Mask
Night and Day
Speech and Silence
Panic and Calmness
Quiet and Loud
Sex and Celebacy
Sanity and Insanity

Bordwell & Thompson
Defined narrative as 'a chain of events in a cause and effect relationship, occurring in time and space'. Meaning typically, a narrative begins with one situation, a series of changes occur according to cause and effect and then a new situation arises that brings the end of the narrative.
For Halloween this makes sense as changes occur in terms of cause and effect, for example one of the girls dies because Michael Myers stabs her with a knife. Nothing happens without a cause in Halloween EXCEPT when Michael Myers gets up after being shot several times in the chest, neck and face. This could be explained by immortality or supernatural intervention etc.
Therefore this definition of narrative apllies quite well to Halloween and it fits in logically and makes sense.