AS Media Institutions Evaluation

1. An Institution is an organisation involved in the
production, distribution, exhibition and/or regulation
of a media text.

2. Production Company
• Our production company is called Xenon Productions. It is a minor company producing horror
films in the UK.
• A production company deals with developing the script and choosing the director, cast, crew etc.
and pitch the idea to a distribution company to get funding of the project.
• We would be working on a low budget thus a independent production studio would be best
suited for it even if it meant the film lacking in technology such as CGI.
• Having known that we wouldn’t have much funding due to it just being one production company
and a minor one at that we chose to have a major/minor as our distribution company, Pathé.

3. Distribution Company
• For our distribution company we have chosen Pathé due to their
major/minor status which would mean that our film would still have a good
amount of funding even if it wouldn’t be a huge box office phenomenum.
• To get our ideas from the production company to the distribution company
we would have to send the film idea to them to make sure they want to go
ahead with the project and having doen this we can assess how much
funding they’ll give us to spend on the film.
• Another minor Horror film they have distributed is The Blair Witch Project
(1999) which had a budget of only $60,000 and made nearly $250million at
box office which we hope would also be able to occur to our film.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)

4. Exhibition
• Having taken a survey on how our target audience consume films we decided that
our film should be exhibited through a cinema. This is because it is the second
most popular from of consumption according to our feedback. Our film is an
independent film thus wouldn’t be able to be shown at big cinemas such as
Cineworld and Odeon but we could use Picture House Cinemas to exhibit it as it is
known for showing minor films.
• Once it had been in cinemas for a short time we could release it onto DVD and
onto subscription sites using a different distributor (such as Distribber who help
smaller films get seen by their target audiences)
• We would also be able to gain feedback through the ratings system on these
services and on websites such as IMDB which a lot of film lovers post reviews on.
• Another way we could exhibit our product would be using YouTube and earning
money off of the Google ads on it.

5. Regulation
• A horror film similar to ours is The Conjuring (2013). This is rated a 15
by the British Board of Film Classification.
• A 15 rating may, according to the BBFC, include the following: strong
violence, frequent strong language, portrayals of sexual activity,
strong verbal references to sex, sexual nudity, brief scenes of sexual
violence or verbal references to sexual violence, discriminatory
language or behavior or drug taking.
• Our film includes: strong language, frequent strong language and
portrayals of sexual activity (due to our romantic sub plot).