Marketing for short films

2.  Film promotion is essentially the advertising campaign stages, merchandising,
and interviewing with the cast and crew members, such as actors and film
directors. The purpose of marketing a film is to open the platform to an audience
so they are aware of its existence, encouraging them to view it. The way a film is
promoted can have an immense effect on whether it is successful, this is generally
why a population is more aware of a higher budget film, in contrast to
independent ones, as they do not have the budget to award a large cost towards
advertising therefore an audience aren’t even aware of their existence.

3.  Viral marketing is a simple, effective way to promote a short film. This would be the most
effective choice for a movie like ours, as it is independent with a limited budget. Viral
marketing is the use of internet purposes to share awareness of a short film. Viral
marketing is expressed through social media bases such as Instagram and the most
popular, Facebook. Viral marketing allows a product to reach a large potential audience
due to the expansion of technology and the proliferation in the use of - the multifunctioning
device of a smart phone, to use social networking on and be able to access videos on. The
most popular way of raising awareness of a short independent movie would be to create a
Facebook page. This generates interest by the spread from person to person, by ‘sharing’ or
‘tweeting’ through the social media base-twitter.

4.  This type of marketing is specifically used in the promotion of our short film. A radio trailer
is a condensed version of the narrative, containing key facts such as the release date, title,
dialogue and sounds featured within the movie. This differs from a visual type of
marketing such as a teaser poster, using vocal purposes rather than imagery. This usually
lasts around thirty to forty seconds, to be long enough to provide the correct information
yet not too long to ensure an audience’s attention is sustained. This type of promotion is
aimed to intrigue an audience with parts from the plot to allow them to use their
imagination to almost figure out a narrative until the official video trailer is released. Facts
are key to the radio trailer to enable a sense of authority to an audience, particularly on the
reviews such as ‘thrillingly enchanting – the daily mail’.

5.  To promote our short movie, each group member completed a teaser poster. As a group we
then selected the design we preferred. Using this design we created a template on Adobe
Photoshop.
 A teaser poster is the initial promotion method used to ambiguously introduce a movie
without giving too much information away to provide eagerness for an audience to view it.
This contains an image as the central focus to the plot, either a key character or object and
perhaps a tagline. The initial purpose of a teaser poster is to incite a sense of hype towards
the release of a trailer or the movie itself, hence the verb ‘tease’.

7.  Production companies which have larger budgets contrasted to independent
companies have the ability to take viral marketing to the next level this is shown
in the video on the last slide of the research, The Dark Knight Rises viral
marketing campaign. This spread across the globe to all fan bases through the
usage of the social media website twitter and the official Dark Knight Rises
website containing a letter which was the framework for the population to find
graffiti which was supporting the Dark Knight’s return, to then photograph it and
upload it to twitter to unlock the full trailer, scene by scene.

8.  Higher budget movies, usually part of the big six have the ability to use unique
factors such as interviews with cast in a radio trailer, as star casts (well known
actors such as Leonardo Dicaprio) attract a pre-established fan base, eager to
know of the character they are playing, allowing them to elaborate on the
personality they portray in the narrative.

9.  Teaser posters. In terms of bigger budget, a full length movie may use a sector of
the release poster as a teaser poster much like the avengers shown below. By
using a letter from the title, a pre established fan base automatically recognises
this without no other images, creating hype.