Film Promotion Emily Newell

Marketing Plan To market our film we plan on promoting our film in various different ways such as, posters and magazine articles. We will also use viral marketing as a way to get our film noticed. By creating flash mobs of infected people and filming it to then upload online to create a type of viral video, much like how the creators of ‘Carrie’ made the ‘Telekenetic Coffee Shop Surprise’ video which now has over 52,000,000 views. Much like a trailer is for many films, it is our key promotional product. This is because it is the main product that truly explains and shows our film for what it is, a dystopic thriller. Our marketing techniques such as, posters, magazines and viral videos will bring our audience, but our trailer is what will keep the audiences and persuade them to see the film. Our unique selling point which is that there is no specific sign of a person being infected, unlike many films where the infected are obvious, for example, zombies. We thought that to push the boundaries of a typical thriller, we would create something that could potentially go unnoticed. Throughout the run-up to our film we plan on releasing teaser trailers and also the viral video as a way to build up to the final release of the finished trailer.

Marketing is crucial to the success of a film, it’s done through Film Distribution companies and often matches the budget of the production. Film distribution is often seen as the most important part of the film industry, it’s the key part to making your product as successful as possible. Film Production Film Distribution Film Exhibition Distributors must clearly identify the target audience of the film and inform when the film is about to be released. Box office taking over the first weekend are important to cover the cost of production. In it’s opening weekend, Monsters made a taking £348, Days Later made £1,500,079 in it’s opening weekend in the UK.

Our film, ‘Epidemic’ is an independent film and much like other independent films we will have to go about distributing our film in a similar way. By gaining links with distributors, they act as a ‘pig-in-the- middle’ link, in order to help promote the film. Many British Independent films often use UK Film Council Funding, a company who want to broaden the choice of film shown to the UK audience. They have £4 million a year in which they have the choice to support the distribution of independent films that may not otherwise be shown quite so widely.

Film Posters Film posters are one of the main things that brings the audience to your film. It has to be something gripping, that’ll make the audience want to see the film. The facts that are usually given on a film poster is; a tagline, the name of the film, when the film is released and also the producers, directors, actors etc. The main image that is conventionally used on a film poster is the protagonist. Occasionally when a film has more than one main character, such as Harry Potter, there are a few different film posters. As a way to create buzz to the film each characters poster may be released at separate times. Such as, the release of the final Harry Potter film, where they released Ron’s poster, then Hermione, and then finally Harry’s poster was released. tagline protagonist film title billing release date

Magazine Cover The purpose of magazines are to further promote your film. Depending on which film magazine you use, you are promoting your film to a different audience. Empire and Total Film are magazines which are quite mainstream, they are released to an audience in which have a general knowledge about film, whereas Sight and Sound have an audience of film fanatics, people who know everything about film. Lastly, there is Little White Lies, which is a slightly indie option for a film magazine. Film magazines are laid out slightly similar to film posters in that, usually the protagonist of the film is in the forefront, they are usually positioned in the middle 1/3 of the magazine, this draws your eye to the protagonist. Usually the image of the actor is in front of the title of the magazine, like in the images above, again this shows the importance of the character.

By having your film on a magazine cover it will help further promote our film to specific audiences. If you have an eye-catching image of your protagonist, whether it be male or female, it will draw peoples attention to it. With having an independent film, it will be harder to gain recognition as our protagonist isn’t a famous actor, so it will be harder to draw people in. Will we have to work a lot harder to make the image eye-catching by having bright colours etc. Another way in which the magazine will be able to promote the film is from reviews inside the magazine. Having your film being reviewed by a well- known magazine will boosts it’s recognition.

Empire Magazine is one of the biggest film magazines in the world, it tries to deliver the best movie coverage, they have amazing relationships with filmmakers across the world such as, Stephen Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino. With what seems to be an ever-growing audience of films in recent years, film magazines are booming and will create a lot of interest for our film. Empire is similar to many other film magazines in that they always have the main character on the front, the background to the magazine, and sometimes even the title of the magazine, represent the narrative of the film. From January to December 2012 it had a readership of 873,000. It’s average reader is a year old male, which is the target audience for our film. We believe that Empire will be the best magazine to promote our film as it is the magazine that best fits to our demographic.