BFI Southbank Talk

I got these notes from Rob Miller's talk on the OCR and Eduqas A level media course:

Film:
What makes a mainstream film?

• Star Marketing
• High Budget 
• Established Director
• CGI
• Known company behind the film (Disney)
• Family Friendly
• High Quality Soundtrack
• Wide/saturated distrubution (distrubuted all over the world)
• Safe genre(a film easily marketed to audiences)
• 1 of the Big Six

What makes a independent film?

• Niche marketing, small target audience
• No CGI
• Regional representation
• Not meant to be entertaining, meant to show a political message
• Funded by a range of different organisations
• Crowd funding smaller independent films
• Low budget
• On location shooting, no studio work
• Not a safe genre, social realism
• More critical success (Awards + Reviews) than commercial success 

Key Terms For Film:

Distribution / Distributer : Getting films out to cinemas, like disney being the distributer

Digital Technology : Social media marketting

Synergy : 2 organisations / 2 parts of a film working together. Straight Outta Compton - film helping the music sell and vice versa.

Convergence : Where a film is available/consumed and can be merketted on a number of cross media platforms.

Straight Outta Compton:
Is it a mainstream film or not?

• Black American history
• Synergy - music and film sell each other
• Semi star marketing (Dr Dre, Eazy E and Ice Cube)
• Political statements (Institutional Racism)
• Global distribution by the Big Six
• Young male target audience
• Emotive representation
• Little man VS Bigger man story
• Highest grossing music biopic ever
• Medium production budget ( $50m budget)

Video Games:

David Gauntlett: 'Video Games dont have an audience do they'

Growing older gaming demographic

Key Terms For Video Games:

AAA games : high production/marketed games

Publisher : Distributer of the game

Developer : Maker

Designer : People working with the games software

PEGI : Video game classification

Engine : A program used to build a game off of

Oligopoly : A group of companies that make a AAA game together

Minecraft -

Started as Indie, became huge

125 million copies sold

14 -25 , ABC demographic

Assassins Creed III -

Historic 

Violence Sells 

Asperational PEGI rating 18, people want to play an 18 to see what passes as an 18

Newspapers:

Conventions of a tabloid:

• Restricted Language Code
• Dramatised facts
• High ration to photographs compared to text
• Varied Fonts
• Subjective Epistemologies - opinionated ways of telling a story

1 company owns most local newspapers in the UK, Trinity Mirror

Soft news - Celeb news, Not very hard hitting, TV analysis, Sport, Voyeuristic Crime

Hard news - Economy, Boring news, Education, Politics, Health care, Business

We media - Public reporting the news through social media before news publications can.

Radio:

Zoo format - Bits and Pieces , Presenter lead e.g. Nick Grimshaw (Radio 1)

Kiss, huge competition to Radio 1 Breakfast show

PSB - Public Service Broadcasting (BBC)