The Rain Dance film festival would be a good option to screen our low-budget indie film. The festival screens short films for reasonable entry fees of £25-£55 and was attended by 13,500 people in 2012. Getting our film screened here could help appeal to bigger studios. We could also use social media and free screenings to promote the film. Finally, applying for funding from bodies like the BFI would help with distribution, as they support getting British films to wide audiences, and securing their backing may attract other funders as well.

1. What kind of media institution
might distribute your media product
and why?

2. Film Festivals

3. Rain Dance
Rain dance’s office’s are at 10 Craven Street, London. It is an Indie film
festival. The 2015 festival is being held between 23rd of September – 4th of
October. It is £25 to enter a short film and £55. You have to send in a
DVD/BluRay of the product at least 20 days prior to the festival.
It would be a good exhibitor for our film as it screens indie film s for the
prices mentioned above. As our film is a low/no budget production this is
useful as we don’t have the money to distribute it ourselves or the
audience/reputation for an established distribution company to get involved
13,500 people attended the festival in 2012 and it has 80,000 online
followers.
It is possible that a representative from a bigger film studio could be
attending, and therefore getting your film screened at this festival is an
opportunity to appeal to bigger companies who could then possibly distribute
it or possibly distribute your future projects.

4. Using the internet
The internet is becoming an increasingly
prevalent way for young aspiring film makers
get their films out there.

5. Video sites like YouTube and Vimeo are often
used as a first step for unknown first time film
makers as a way to get short film’s out there. A
good example of this would be the young
aspiring film maker Charlie McDonnell. He used
his large YouTube audience, acquired from his
previous YouTube activity as an audience for his
short film ‘Offline’. He did this by uploading it to
the same channel

6. However, this is not an option for us as none of
us have a large internet following that I am
aware of. Therefore we would try and use social
media ( / / ) to try and
market/promote our film. We could do this by
asking friends and family members to share the
film to their friends. This would likely be a small
increase in viewers but is a good foundation.

7. Using free screenings like this one organised on social media
would also be useful to us as it is a micro-budget production.

8. Funding
Each year, the BFI invest over £26,000,000 of the lottery fund to fund the
production, marketing and distribution of UK films. We could apply for some
funding from the BFI. They state specifically on their website that they
‘support independent distributors to ensure that the best British films connect
to a wide range of audiences across a range of platforms’. This would be our
first option as according to writer and producer, Stephen Follows, The BFI are
twice as likely to back a thriller (the genre of our film) than the BBC. However,
Follows also stated that ‘no spy films have released between 2009-2013
received funding from a UK-based public body’ so we would be looking to
break this trend.
Finally, if we were to get the BFI on board, then we could also attempt to get
other bodies on board such as the BBC, Film4 and/or the HMRC as there is
often a snowball effect.