Film Industry Factors

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Exhibition

Exhibitors are the companies that house the films. These are companies such as Cineworld, art houses such as Cambridge picture house, Odeon and empire. Art houses are usually distributed inside towns and cities in smaller more ‘cultured’ areas. Larger companies such as Cineworld are found on industrial areas and usually grouped with fast food restaurants. They are more commercial and usually charge a lot more for tickets. At the Cambridge picture house you can be expected to pay £5.20 but at a more commercial screening you can pay anything between £6.00 and £6.50. The films shown differ as well, not only are new releases shown in an art house theatre but also foreign language films, or films from amateur film makers. The experience is also greatly different. In a commercial Cineworld there is commercial food and drink on offer. Whereas at the art house, you will find a area that sales small food and drinks. The screening area is smaller and more intimate rather than the cooped up seating arrangements of an Odeon.   

Distribution

This is how a movie usually gets from the first step of making the film to the cinema:

•      Someone has an idea for a movie.

•      They create an outline and use it to promote interest in the idea.

•      A studio or independent investor decides to purchase rights to the film.

•      People are brought together to make the film (screenwriter, producer, director, cast, crew).

•      The film is completed and sent to the studio.

•      The studio makes a licensing agreement with a distribution company.

•      The distribution company determines how many copies (prints) of the film to make.

•      The distribution company shows the movie (screening) to prospective buyers representing the theaters.

•      The buyers negotiate with the distribution company on which movies they wish to lease and the terms of the lease agreement.

•      The prints are sent to the theaters a few days before the opening day.

•      The theater shows the movie for a specified number of weeks (engagement).

•      You buy a ticket and watch the movie.

•      At the end of the engagement, the theater sends the print back to the distribution company and makes payment on the lease agreement.

Production

Production involves the actual shooting, which, on average, takes eight weeks. The director and actors rehearse on the set. The director chooses the camera angles to be used for each shot. The director of photography works with the “gaffer,” or chief lighting person, to select and position lighting instruments, which “grips” help to rig. The location sound mixer operates the audio recording machine and works with a boom operator. The boom operator positions the microphone close to the actors while being careful to keep the microphone out of the picture.

Usually, a shot is filmed more than once to improve on either a technical element or the performance. For each shot, the script supervisor notes the lens that is used, details of the camera and actor movement, time length of the take, and comments. He or she also indicates which takes will be printed at the film laboratory. Once an acceptable take is made, the crew sets up and rehearses the next shot. Even a simple scene might be covered in four different angles, allowing for creative choices in the editing process.

Green Screening

Independent Research 8

Ben Affleck's Argo and a roundup of the London Film Festival 2012, review - Telegraph

Think of the London Film Festival as a trampoline, strategically placed in the gap between Cannes, Venice and Toronto and the New Year’s award ceremony season. A prestigious slot at London has become a key stop on a film’s journey from the summer festivals to the Oscar and Bafta ballot papers, and The Artist, The King’s Speech and Slumdog Millionaire are just three recent winners to have benefitted from the Leicester Square Bounce.

The springiest of this year’s crop was surely Ben Affleck’s Argo (* * * *), a smart, sinewy thriller based on a stranger-than-fiction CIA hostage extraction during the 1979 diplomatic crisis in Iran.

Affleck’s last picture, a prime cut of Bostonian pulp called The Town, was a love letter to the broad-shouldered Hollywood thrillers of the 1970s, but Argo goes one better, channelling the hardboiled realism of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese to mesmeric effect. It also boasts an irresistible comic twist: the hostages’ cover story, dreamed up by Affleck’s hirsute CIA agent, is that they are working on a non-existent science fiction film shooting in Tehran and the surrounding desert.

Back in Hollywood, an aging producer (Alan Arkin) and a monster make-up specialist (John Goodman) flesh out the cover story: “If I’m gonna make a fake movie, it’s gonna be a fake hit,” snorts Arkin, while flicking through potential scripts. Film festivals can be so focused on artistry that attendees often forget to have fun: Affleck’s meticulously paced, breath-catching thriller provides oodles of both.

Before the Oscars and Baftas there are the London Film Festival’s own awards to get through, including a prize for the best film screened in competition and the Grierson Award for best documentary.

The winners will be announced tomorrow, but my vote for the former would go to In the House (* * * *), François Ozon’s follow-up to his rib-nudging comedy Potiche. Fabrice Luchini’s high school teacher encourages a promising pupil to write about his friendship with a classmate’s family, and as his stories become increasingly juicy, they begin to alter the lives of all concerned. The result is something of a French Rear Window: it’s a fizzingly clever comic drama that turns us all into curtain twitchers.

In the documentary strand, the best I saw was the ferociously compelling West of Memphis (* * * *). This encyclopedic recap of the campaign to free three Arkansas men wrongly imprisoned for a gruesome triple murder crackles with righteous fury.

In the festival’s 56th year, aging and mortality emerged as the major theme, and received both tragic and comic treatments. Michael Haneke’s Amour and Paul Andrew Williams’s Song for Marion both dealt with elderly husbands caring for their wives, although the two films could hardly be more different. (Song for Marion screens tonight as one of the last evening galas.)

An early audience favourite was Quartet (* * *), a great big snuggly Labrador of a film set in a retirement home for classical musicians. Dustin Hoffman, making his directorial debut at 75, remains behind the camera, although with a grand old cast including Maggie Smith and Billy Connolly in front of it, there was little need for him to emerge.

But I was more amused and, yes, moved by Robot & Frank (* * * *), a deliciously inventive, surprisingly tender comedy about a retired cat burglar (Frank Langella) and his robotic home help. The best thing I saw was Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love (* * * * *), a luxuriant, purring poem of intertwined lives with a mischievously curtailed third act. Kiarostami’s film bows out leaving us desperate for more. In its new streamlined, 12 day format, so did London.