Evaluation Question 3

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

A media institution is a company that disperses a media product for audience consumption.

They can be approached with a film-pitch as they can distribute the film much more effectively than a filmmaker could on his own, while they can also offer funding towards the filming and editing process.

Usually films are distributed to cinemas - which is then followed up by a DVD release - or they go straight to DVD. We could start distributing our film by showing it at local, small film festivals where we could start to gain views and fans.

Seeing as our film is a thriller, drawing similarities with films such as 2012, we would want to show it at cinemas seeing as thrillers are very popular in today's society and as ours is predominantly a conventional thriller. Films like ours are usually high-budget so distributing them to cinemas is the quickest and easiest way to reclaim the money.

If we were to choose a media institute to distribute our film, we would want to choose one that can accommodate big production values and can distribute films across the world - as thrillers often require large investments but have the popularity to bring the viewers in and, hence, cover costs. Institutes we could approach include:

• Touchstone Pictures

Touchstone Pictures have distributed films such as Armageddon - a disaster thriller - which is similar to our film as both contain environmental threats.
Touchstone Pictures also distributed Enemy of the State (see above) - which contains the government conspiracy element - so draws similarities with our film as ours involves the government hiding a secret.

• Hollywood Pictures

Hollywood Pictures have distributed films such as Nixon - which contains the political element - so is quite similar to our film.

Both of these media institutes (which are alternate movie divisions of The Walt Disney Company) would be well-suited to distribute our film as they are able to fund the production values while they have the global presence to give our film a global audience. With one of these institutes distributing our film, we would be able to reach the wider, mass market that thrillers appeal to while they could also cover the heavy costs that thrillers often amass.