Film marketing and exhibition - Alea

Film marketing and exhibition is something that has to be thought out as being low budget short film makers we cannot go through the normal methods of mainstream advertising or exhibition.

Mainstream films have their own budget set out for advertising across many different media platforms such as billboards, posters, magazine and newspaer advertising, television spots and even in the cinemas. These come at a large cost for the film makers so we would have to limit our option dramatically. Short films themselves are never really advertised to a great extent and mainly go straight to exhibition but as we have created a poster for our film we can use it for some small scale marketing. Advertising in magazines is possible for us, but not with the page advertisements. Single page spreads cost around the region of £15,000 which is obviously way out of our budget so the only advertising option that would be available to us would be paying for our poster to be used on some inserts in magazines that are targeted at our target audeince age group as they are much cheper. This is not a conventional apporach and can provide some problems as people tend to look on the page inserts as junk mail so it may be possible that they would not gather much interest for people to go. Another way we could advertise that would not cost us any money would be setting up a facebook group which would allow us to target our audinece directly and can gain interest through people sharing the page. This is something more mainstream films are starting to do more often now as sometimes on posters next to the web address for the films official website there are also addresses to social networking groups for the films.

Exhibition of our film is something to think about as with marketing we wont be able to follow the methods of mainstream cinema as we dont have a production company to distribute it in cinemas. In addition to this, the cost to print one film reel is £1500 so we definately would not be able to distribute it in cinemas for a regional release. Instead the most likey method of exhibiton in a cinema would be to exhibit when there is a local short film festival it may not be the best to reach our target audince but people who have an interes in short film would go specificaly to watch them. The best method of exhibition that would target our adince more effectively would be distributing and exhibiting or film online which would also link in well with online marketing as we could make the short film available on itunes which is a reliable service and if we were looking to create a profit from this film we would be able to make it available for a cheap price as it is only a short. For ree exhibition the best place would be YouTube as it is the most popular video sharing website and gives us a global audeience and now with the added movies feature on youtube it will allow people to be able to find our film depending on thier interests.