Distribution Project (Go)

     The most recent project we did in A level was a film distribution project. 

    I think this projects illustrates growth in my ability to work with others and at planning in a few ways, but before I get into that I want to talk about our research phase because I thought it was fun

    I was placed in a group of three and we were assigned a few stories from our teacher's creative students to choose from. We would create a distribution plan for whatever story we chose. After picking our story, we contacted our writer with a list of questions that weren't necessarily mentioned and likely wouldn't even appear in the trailer, but would help us understand the narrative universe and the choices the characters were making. 

    We also completed a research chart looking at two similar case studies within our genre, their distribution plans, trailers, etc. My favorite part about this chart was looking at the case studies' movie posters, as I ended up unexpectedly learning a lot about common tropes and what they mean, the history of movie posters, and even made connections to my past genre studies.

    Ok, now I want to note the ways we handled this project that I think specifically show how I improved after self reflecting on my documentary.

    The first problem we had to confront was that myself and another group member were quarantining after winter break before coming back to school, which took off some time before we were able to meet as a group for the first time. However, as soon as we did, we put a plan together to efficiently work for the remainder of the time we had, and we stuck to that plan! (this earns an exclamation point from me because I was used to always drawing up unrealistically long to-do lists/plans and not being able to follow through, but I took into account my limitations here)

An example of my planner while working on the project. 

Sneak Peek: you can see that I had started setting things 

up for my portfolio project at this time

    Then, we split the work for the project up evenly. Each of us had jurisdiction over our own sections, which made things efficient. It also took some stress off of our shoulders knowing that we had a concrete shared vision that we discussed upfront and then trusting each other to uphold that in each of our parts.

    For example, after some discussion of what we thought was best overall for the poster, Nicole had complete jurisdiction over editing it, and did an amazing job.

    Larissa researched our target audience and edited our trailer. Again, she did really well with her section.

    It was down to me to create the distribution strategy and edit the teaser. 

    I felt that creating this plan itself was another exercise in getting as creative as possible while accounting for limitation. This is because we operated on the assumption that this would be an independent film, likely with a small budget, but we thought a theatrical release would best suit a "revival" of the teen dystopia (for the nostalgia factor). 

    I recognized that taking on an indie film is perceived as more risky by traditional theaters, so I knew that garnering audience engagement prior to release would be an important part of the strategy in order to reassure potential partners. I looked into our target audience research to devise a plan that would capture their attention without breaking the bank. Ultimately, I decided to build up audience familiarity with a guerilla marketing technique, incorporating a direct mail campaign that would be cheap and would tie into our movie's story (which features a world where people receive mysterious letters detailing their time of death). On top of the letters from our movie mailed and otherwise distributed en masse, I looked back to one of our first lessons in the class on social media regulation before deciding to partner with a few nano-influencers, another not-too-expensive way to get communities of our target audience on platforms like tiktok and reddit trying to find the meaning of these mysterious letters. All of this would culminate into the discovery of a pre-release screening of our movie right where it was filmed. I loved the idea of a hyper realistic event that would completely immerse audience members into the film, especially with an audience so accustomed to post-modern media, but it would have been difficult to create that experience if we needed to build a set, have actors/performers, etc. Luckily, when your movie was filmed in your town's central plaza, and you know from experience that events like movie nights can be planned there, you can do that without having to build a theme-park level attraction. 

    Hopefully, this marketing strategy would drum up enough buzz about the movie for theaters to see the screening as less of a risk to them. I also planned for a release date of November 29th, 2024. I chose the weekend of thanksgiving break because it was still during the school year, a crucial time for out TA members to generate buzz amongst each other, but was also at a time that most members would be free, because really what do you do the weekend after thanksgiving? I went a few years into the future because I thought we might still have to make the movie which would probably take a while, but I chose the year 2024 for two specific reasons. Considering our target audience, I knew video game releases could potentially take away from out revenue. As of now, 2024 is only seeing the release of sequels and continuations of games that already exist, nothing too distracting. Secondly, 2024 is an election year, and November 29th would come quite close to the election. From my research, I knew that there was a considerable spike in dystopian and social commentary films after elections due to general political unrest, so I felt this an opportune time for the release of the film. 

Here's a link to our full presentation.

    Other notable areas of improvement for me this year were of course in my technical knowledge and access to better resources/equipment, but now I think you have a good idea of where I'm at.