Researching the Industry

Brief History


The film industry began with The Lumière Brothers shooting their first film named Arrival of A Train At La Ciotat in 1896. These brothers are iconic to the film industry as their work features in the modern film named Hugo directed by Martin Scorsese.
The Lumière Brothers created a lot of films, for example Moscow: Tverskaia Street and The Pyramids. These then inspired other early cinematographers such as Georges Méliès (who also features in Hugo) with the film Le Voyage Dans La Lune, the revolution of films took the world by surprise, the notion of moving images simply of a train heading towards the camera eventually evolved in the creation of Blockbusters such as Avatar and Inception, the gradual change of silent movies, to colour, to CGI, to 3D is truly remarkable.
From Méliès to Hitchcock to Scorsese to Fincher to Tarantino to Mendes, from Rear Window and Psycho to Kill Bill and American Beauty, the creation of genres took place later on when the audience began to expect more.
A moving train used to be enough to wow an audience, now it takes a lot more, innovative and unique plot with great character development, themes to your preference and other factors that The Lumiere Brother's didn't have to take into effect, they could create what technology allowed them to, whatever their imagination could allow them to imagine and create.

In this textual analysis I will be analysing the film industry as a whole, however I will especially highlight the Contemporary Thriller Genre as that is my end goal, I will keep in mind my practical task, to create a short opening to a thriller film.

Before we begin creating our movie, we need to research the context of development, there are five phases when creating a movie, these are:

• Development
• Pre-production
• Production
• Post-production
• Distribution

I will be discussing all 5 of these stages thoroughly in this blog post.

Development

In development there are a further 8 factors to consider.

1. Story - developing the script with the director and script editor. Converting the first draft into second drafts until they eventually reach a final
2. Appeal
3. Genre
4. Past Experience
5. Budget
6. Castability
7. Marketability
8. Payability

There is such a phrase that Filmmakers dread, Development Hell, where an idea gets tossed about that much, scripts get thrown away just as many times as one is written, time is wasted at business meetings after business meetings and the entire meaning of the film gets altered from one thing to the exact opposite within the space of 2 hours. Where no concept gets "caught" all ideas just float about, this movie then lands itself in Development Hell.

In development you need to hire the original team, Screenwriter, Directors and Assistant Directors, Cinematographer and all the crew; Location Scout, Costume Designers etc. It is where you decide whether the film will be financially viable, have an audience. It's the key part of filmmaking where people fail due to lack of preparation.

Preproduction

In preproduction, it is what it states, you prepare for production.
Filmmakers plan the locations, plan shooting, plan the budget, casting, shot list, costumes, overall organisation, travel and accommodation.
If Development has been done well then Preproduction should be a lot easier, Preproduction is a key, where Storyboarding and Scriptwriting has to be finalised ready for Production.

Production

Production is where the actual filming takes place, this is where the cast rehearse and the crew plan the scenes to create the ideal situation, principal photography is done. All of the plans from Preproduction and Development get converted into the Production process, all of the shots are created, all the scenes are filmed.
The shot would have been blocked by the director and all people need to do is keep to the plan and shoot the film.

Postproduction

In Postproduction, all of the footage shot in Production is edited, put together in an appropriate sequence, the sound is mixed, specialist people will be hired to use The Art of Foley to create more realistic sounds, the score is created, sound effects and music is finalised.
A trailer should be created, a 90 second clip that will be interesting enough to give the viewers a small overview of the film. Depending on in which language it was shot in and where the film is being distributed, dialogue scripts should be created so when played in foreign countries, sub-titles will be used to aid in understanding dialogue.
All the finishing touches should be made, visual effects created and it should be ready to be a feature film.

Distribution

The success of a film is usually celebrated by the director, producer and screen writer, etc. However an even bigger part to the film making process is distributor and marketer. In my opinion the film Cloverfield was marketed extremely well. The film itself only achieved a 7.1 rating on IMDB but managed to gross over $80,000,000. It released a series of teaser trailers to spark a lot of hype.
Cloverfield used techniques of viral marketing such as:
Teaser Trailers, Synergy (with Japanese drink named Slusho) and an extremely intriguing technique where they created their own websites spreading conspiracies similar to those reached in Cloverfield to attract more viewers and hype.

Distribution is important to advertise the film, to create revenue for the film, to get viewers and audience to increase the overall income.
Films will be played in cinemas all over the world, the more cinemas that play your film, the more people will watch your film, distribution allows people to watch the movie and in effect raise the total gross of the film.