What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Our media product is considered to be an independent project alongside the fact that is a historically based movie set in 1917 Russia. The movie is produced by Red Star productions, a production company focused on small independent historical movies that have a small but reliable audience with an interest in these types of movies. As the film cost little to make in relative terms it has a higher and more secure chance of making it's money back due to the stable nature of our audience which will be a helpful factor when it comes to securing a distribution deal. however we need to make sure that the movie will also cover the distribution costs as well as the production costs.

In comes Insurge Pictures, a distribution company targeted towards "Micro-Budget films", with budgets of up to $100,000 each, founded in 2010 by parent company Paramount studios who is known for the distribution of two ctitically acclaimed war movies, Saving private Ryan and Enemy at the Gates (One of the inspirations for making our movie).
Insurge would be a good choice for a distributor due to it's attitude towards indie films and the relationship it has with a well known company such as Paramount studios which allows the movie to reach out to a bigger audience because vertical integration Insurge has with Paramount studios.

Another route we could take would be finding a distributor that could show our movie over terrestrial television as that may be a better and more secure way of gaining an audience for our movie. Channel 4 is well known for it's friendly attitude towards indie movies, the well known Film4 is specifically made to produce movies from well known independent directors, and with Channel 4 being a well known name across UK television it would help spread our movie to a wider audience. Channel 4 also has "almost universal coverage in the United Kingdom and some neighbouring countries" allowing for our movie to be shown overseas as well widening the potential audience we have by a significant amount as our film would most likely find success in a more European audience, due to the nature of the film, compared to trying to market it to a American audience. Film4 also has a very successful history in producing Independent films with very popular films such as Trainspotting and Slumdog millionaire so if our film were to be shown on the Film4 channel brand association with them might also help widen our target audience.
I believe we have been realistic in our choice of potential distribution company, as both these companies have a history of supporting small, arthouse films, and in a lot of cases make them a lot of money.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Due to the historical nature of our film, no  social groups are directly respresented by our film. However, the actions of our main character show how the responsibility for the actions taking place rest on this one man's shoulders. The idea of this main charachter may be relatable to by older audiences, or perhaps if we developed more of the film we could explore the idea of him going though a transitional period of having no responsibilities to a position where lives are at risk. The older end of our target audience, generally those 25+ would be able to relate to our characters struggle.The representation in the film is also primarily male, suggesting a similar pattern in the groups represented.

Finally, the military style of the film may be representative of both present day and retired military personnel, and could help show to the audience the struggles faced by those fighting in current wars, and the decisions they need to make in order to keep themselves and thie team safe from harm.

Although not strictly a social group, we felt this film could act as something to inform people about the events of WWI, especially as it is an important part of the UK's history. This representation could cause the film to have success in other European nations, as it represents groups from bygone days in these countries.

Credits

We plan to do our credits almost as if they are being written by a type writer on the screen, the inspiration for using this idea came from previous films and tv shows with the same effect.

For example;             RED OCTOBER

However the letters we hope will come on screen indivually as if they are being written.

Updated ; this is what we believe will be the final product

Editing

Editing proved to be difficult because of techincal problems with the computers. We orignally were using a Mac to edit our film, however the mac kept on freezing and we lost lots of already edited work due to this, we eventually had to transfer what we had of our work onto a standard PC.
Whilst editing, we ended up changing round shots because we found by simply changing the order of some shots, a whole new feel could be potrayed.
-Alex bryant, who is in our group had experience using Flash and so he was able too create the titles and the final shot in which the sky turns red. He did this very well and the titles especially turned out better than we imagine at the start of the project.

Filming

For our filming we wanted a day in which the weather was very dull, and slightly rainy. This was to help set the mood of our film and also keep with the likely weather conditions within Russia. However we could not get all the extras to be available for the suitable weather conditions, so we had to just film when we could. As we started filming we were faced with some obstacles that we had to overcome. We eventually ended up having to the main block of the filming on a sunny day, which was not orginally intended but it was the only time it was possible. However once we had got the main proportion of the filming complete and started to piece some shots together in the editing phase, we found we were missing some crucial linking shots. This meant we had to go out and film again,but we could not get the same actors and we could not get the
same weather conditions. We were forced to film what we could on the day, the shots we filmed were a shot of the main character lighting up a cigarette and walking on, this allowed the the shots of the charcter walking to flow into one another.

We were also faced with issues of props, we had very limited props in comparison to what we would of wanted. However we could not get hold of them, this forced us to come up with new ideas for shots, for example,orignally we  wanted a shot of a tent in which the chacter was in but we could not get a tent that would look right for our film, so instead we had to use plain bed sheets to imply that there was a tent present.

Storyboard

Story boards + Anamatics

We made a start on our story boards, and we further changed our ideas. We decided that we would add credits between shots during the suit up scene, the font of the credits will resemble a type writter to add effect and create a more professional feel. These credits allow the suit up scene to run smootly and not to appear to jumpy between cuts, and this will allow us to run the credits without obstructing any of the shots.




Credits

We plan to do our credits almost as if they are being written by a type writer on the screen, the inspiration for using this idea came from previous films and tv shows with the same effect.

For example;             RED OCTOBER

However the letters we hope will come on screen indivually as if they are being written.

Mise en scene

As we're making the opening for a historical film set approximately 80 years ago, Mise-en-scène is incredibly important for making our opening look believable, interesting and showing good continuation.
We wrote a list of items we could potentially need and went about trying to collect them. This ensured that when it came to filming we had a convincing set with excellent Mise-en-scène.

• Any bullets, bullet casings or shells.
• Any military style uniform, such as boots, military jackets and hats.
• Indicators of the location, era and situation the characters are in (war time) 
•  Documents and papers, some with black boxes over parts of the text.
• Ashtray
• A smoking fire/camp fire, or a campfire effect.
• Any replica weapons

Combined with our plans of making the titles and music represent the location and era, this will make our film opening look authentic.

Production name and logo

We chose the name Red Star Productions. It sums up the genre of film opening we are producing, and is an exciting name that could become associated with producing both historic films, or those based on action and war, to produce titles similar to those found in our research:

• Hunt for Red October
• Saving Private Ryan
• Che

 We brainstormed for ideas for a logo. On paper, we made sketches of potential candidates, deciding we needed a logo that was bold, bright and represented the film we were producing. Eventually we combined two of our ideas coming up with the following logo.
Here is the logo produced to represent what our film company is about: It is simple yet very bold and straight to the point. The Red colour and hammer and sickle symbol were chosen as they provide a bold and recogniseable image when the logo appears in the opening titles of our film opening.

The logo was created using Adobe photoshop CS4 for the shapes, and Adobe flash CS4 for the filters and shading (flash was used as the filters can be changed in an animation, for example where the logo fades in the titles)