3. What kind of media institutions might describe your media product and why?

We chose to use two production companies for our film.

BFE Productions

BFE Productions is the big budget production company in the UK, they are very commercial and were the production company for our film so funded it. They produce films with a wide range of genres from family films to horrors but are especially interested in Indie Films as they can be made on quite a low budget but can make them a big profit, a very good example of this was the film Paranormal Activity.

Impact Films

Impact Films are the distributor for ‘Dark Summer’, they are a much smaller independent UK based company specialising in low budget, gritty and edgy films. They had to distribute our film and get it well known in the UK.

As our film is a low budget independent film, it wouldn’t get into a mainstream cinema such as Cineworld but more like an independent cinema such as The Pheonix in London, http://www.phoenixcinema.co.uk/, this would allow us to get our film known and give us more options. It could also be shown at various film festivals such as London Film Festival, it could also be put onto the internet on popular sites with our target audience’s age range such as Youtube and Facebook.

This would create word of mouth about the film and hopefully it would gain a big audience just as Paranormal Activity did. Paranormal Activity was first shown at a small film festival and was put on the web and phenomenally created a mass audience with people begging for it to be in cinemas in their town, but didn’t reach its huge success until Stephen Spielberg found it and showed Paramount. When Paramount got behind the film, that’s when it went global and made an enormous profit. Paramount plays the part of BFE Productions in our film in that it is the major production company behind it.

The Duchess

The Duchess is very similar to our film in that Paramount was the main big budget production company behind it but smaller UK based independent companies such as BBC Films, Pathe and Qwerty films were the distributors of the film. This is how an independent film can reach global success, this is a very good example of Vertical Integration.