Mr Smith Audience and Institutions

“Media production is dominated by global institutions, which sell their products and services to national audiences”.To what extent do you agree with this statement?

TOPIC - The BIG area of study

ASPECT - The small focus within that area

VIEWPOINT - The belief about that area

INSTRUCTION - What your answer must do.

Topic  US + UK film 

Aspect How US and UK films are made 

View Point The Big Six and how they are control of the filming industry 

Instruction Your own opinion 

identifying what information i will need to know in order to answer the question

A But the sad thing is that what hasn’t changed is the cost of marketing a film to the public. I’ll give you an example of the King’s Speech is being released in the US. The budget of our film was about 15 million dollars – at the very least they’ll probably spend 25 to 30 million marketing it America so they are going to spend almost double the cost of production on the cost of selling it and that is just in one country. So the sad thing about it is that there is still a kind of lock down on who gets to make films that reach everyone because even if you do effectively make your film for nothing, for a distributor they’ve still got to look at a huge amount of money to get the film out to everyone. So the revolution that I expected when the digital age came when I thought film making would be very democratic hasn’t quite taken off. And the other thing that stopped that happening is unfortunately the star system, which still hasn’t gone away. In the end one of the ways to get the bandwidth to get people to pay attention to your films is to get a big star and that remains expensive.

It’s certainly true that you can make a film cheaply; I keep finding films that my nine-year old made on my flip phone. He’s at it, he’s doing it and he’s developing something that while is certainly entertaining for him could also be a skill, a story telling skill. I was thinking while Tom was talking about how now anyone can make a film for almost nothing but its not happening because you also have to be rather good at it, there has to be a skill in place for it to work. But you achieve that by doing exactly what Tom has just said and what you now have which is a gift that my generation didn’t have quite so much access to is stuff that you can do it on. We’ve always had pencil and paper but now we have film making materials at our fingertips.

The other thing that is extraordinary is that you can make a film and you have the right to post it on You Tube.

You can put it out in public and get some people seeing it and that’s an unbelievable revolution. Again, in the old days I made my films but no one saw them apart from my family them because how would anyone see them.                                   

you could argue that media production is dominated by global institutions because the big 6 such as paramount productions own a lot of filming equipment and cameras that are simply to expensive for filmmakers with a small budget to buy for example the Sony HDC F950 which was used to film avatar each camera costs $115,800.00. 

British Film Industry - Taken From BBC

The British film industry should back more mainstream movies, a report is expected to recommend next week.
Ahead of a visit to Pinewood Studios on Wednesday, Prime Minister David Cameron said the film industry should support "commercially successful pictures".
His comments come before the publication of Lord Smith's review into the government's film policy on Monday.
The review was commissioned to find out how the industry could offer better support to UK film-making.
Mr Cameron praised the UK film industry but said "we should aim even higher, building on the incredible success of recent years".
He acknowledged the British film industry had made "a £4bn contribution to the UK economy and an incalculable contribution to our culture".
Lord Smith, the former Labour culture secretary, is also expected to recommend developing an export strategy to increase the profits of British films.
Speaking to the BBC, director Ken Loach said it was important to have a diverse film industry with a wide range of films to choose from.

Dredd
Budget: $45 million
Box Office Gross: $36.5 million

Distributer: Entertainment Film and Lionsgate

Running time: 95 minutes

Genre: Sci-Fi, Action

Produced by: DNA Films, IM Global and Reliance Entertainment

Actors:

Dredd - Karl Urban

Judge Cassandra Anderson - Olivia Thurlby

Kay - Wood Harris

MaMa - Lena Heady

Location it was filmed in was mainly South Africa, the rest was produced in CGI, the costumes tend to be of a science fiction genre.

This film took $6,278,491 (USA) (21 September 2012) on the opening weekend.

Star Trek: Into Darkness 

Budget: £190 million
Box Office Gross: $470 million
Distributer: Paramount Pictures (Big Six)
Running time: 133 minutes
Genre: Sci-Fi
Produced by: Bad Robot Productions, K/O Paper Productions and SkyDance Productions

Actors:
Chris Pine - Captain Kirk
Benedict Cumberbatch - Khaan
Simon Pegg - Scotty
Zoe Saldana - Uhura
Alice Eve - Dr Marcus
Zachary Quinto - Spock
Karl Urban - Doctor

Star Trek were originally going to CGI everything in the film but they decided to build it all because they wanted it to be more realistic and they could afford it, unlike the film 'Dredd' because they didn't have the money so they had to CGI everything.  Star Trek was predominantly filmed with in warehouses, however spaceships are filmed on real life huge dustbins and edited away to look Sci-Fi like. They also used an element of CGI, however JJ Abrams (director) wanted to produce as much props as possible and edit them to make it look more life like and real.
Star Trek used IMAX camera for 30 minutes of the film
This film took $70,165,559 (USA) (17 May 2013) on the opening weekend at the cinema.

20 miles to go see it cannot have had a saturated release whereas star trek was released widely