Film 4 Production Practices

Film four is an independant British film company, owned by the Channel4 Corporation, which was launced on the 1st of November 1998. The company has recently improved their budget to £15m per year, contrasting to the £8-10m they were on previously. Film4's controller is Tessa Ross, who has an alternative way of thinking which reflects Film4's choice in films.

Film4's style is quirky and experimental. Their philosiphy is to aid directors and actors, and give them their 'big break'. By sticking to the quirky and non-mainstream style of films they cater for a seperate audience, which helps them compete with Hollywood films.

Their biggest success is Slumdog Millionaire, which wasn't expected to gross 25 times it's original budget; raking in a staggering $377910544. Again, it is not your typical film, adressing contraversial issues yet in a different style to Hollywood. 

The Film4 channel is a freeview channel in the U.K and Ireland, which now manily airs Hollywood blockbusters around 2 years after their release, it also broadcasts it's own productions. In August 2007 Channel 4 added the Film4+1 channel, which allows viewers to see the film an hour behind the original broadcasting time. They also added a Film4 on demand service, which allows viewers to watch a selection of Film4 productions anytime. 

The Film4 website (www.film4.com) has an on demand service, information on productions, video clips, reviews, interviews, behind the scenes clips, and competitions. It gives the viewer a wide variety of special features, producers, writers, directors and actors.

Channel Four Television Corporation was set up by the government. It is a publicly owned "not-for-profit" corporation and does not have any shareholders.

Working Title production practices

Working Title;

• Co-Chair people of working title are Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, who have been listed as the most powerful figures in British industry.
• They only have 42 full time staff, which is split between working title (main company) and low budget WT2.
• Secret of their success? "The working title philosophy has always been to make films for an audience- by that I mean play in a multiplex. We totally believe in this because we know it is the only hope we have of sustaining the UK film industry"
• Working Title was founded in 1984
• 85 films have grossed more than $4 billion worldwide
• They have won several awards; six academy awards, 26 BAFTA awards, 4 Oscars and prizes at Cannes and Berlin film festivals
• Impressive catalogues of films from a wide range of genres; Billy Elliott, Johnny English, Love Actually and Shaun of the dead.
• Their flops have been Wimbledon, Thunderbirds and Captain Corelli.
• Blockbuster comedies of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson who deliver punchy period films, political dramas, litery adaptation and family affairs.
• Working Title launch fresh talent, such as directors Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) and Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliott)
• In addition to which it has launched 'Working Title 2' a subsidiary for low budget films with an 'independant' appeal
• Their most successful genre is RomComs. The companies 'Treasure' is Hugh Grant.
• Working Title was bought by Polygram, taken over by Universal in 1999. Bevan said "We were now part of a big structure, so we spent much less time on finding the money and much more on developing the scripts"
• Universal own a 67% stake in the company, many of its recent films are co-productions with Studio Canal.
• The remaining shares are owned by the companies founders which is the BBC and private investors.
• Working title is clever and tactical about film projects. In 2004 they made Shaun of the Dead, and Bridget Jones 2, knowing they would financially be OK, because Thunderbirds was a flop the other two supported it.
• They have to make 1 big blockbuster per year that makes $200-$400m in the box office revenues.
• Is Working Titles lower budget film brand. Some of their productions are Billy Elliott (2000), Shaun of the dead (2004) and Ali G in da house. WT2 recently released Burn After Reading starring Brad Pitt and George Cloony.
• A long history between American actors playing leading roles in British films; e.g Rene Zelwegger playing Bridget Jones.
• The importance of release dates is vital, as it can make or break a films success. e.g films released in winter generally do better as the weather is colder and people spend more time indoors. Christmas films tend to do better if released in the Christmas period (Love Actually) , the same with Romantic films doing better around Valentines day.

Magazine Production

For the production of my magazine I had to firstly get the photos I needed of Becca, so firstly we had to find somewhere to take the photos ( I was Becca's model) which wasn't hard because we needed a white background so we took them outside and in the new canteen, Becca was doing a maths magazine called 'geek' hence why i was in the glasses.

I took about ten shots of Becca, vice versa, which didn't take long as we took around ten shots of each other before we decided we had the variety we needed.

I then uploaded the photos onto a computer in the classroom, then decided which one I wanted for my cover and started to edit it on photoshop. The photo that I decided to use for my cover was the one below of Becca looking like she was doing a mime, you wouldn't look at it and automatically think 'drama' but if the cover gave it all away you wouldnt want to read more. I also chose it because the specifcation was that we had to have a mid shot of somebody for our front cover and this was one of the only mid shots I got, I decided to use one of the pictures of Becca jumping for my contents page.

I started by cutting around Becca using the lasso tool, which took about a billion years because the computers in there are very slow. I wasn't pleased with my final cut out of Becca because it looked a bit sketchy and a bit of her head was missing where I'd gone wrong, which I wasn't really pleased with because nobody wants to buy a magazine with the model on the front who has a bit of her head missing. Then Mr Smith showed me the magnetic lasso tool which was a lot easier because it found the outline of Becca and it made it look a lot smoother.

I then had to choose my font for the title. I chose a font that I cant remember the name of but it looks a lot like this one, because it is dramatic and that is the theme of the  magazine. The colour palette I chose of the text for the cover was the same blue of the cardigan Becca was wearing. I thought it was important to chose the same blue as it made the magazine cover have a theme, rather than me chosing three different colours as well as becca being in blue, it could have looked a bit messy and not actually thought into that much, white ( as i'd given the cover a black background ) and a bright peach colour. I achieved the same blue as Becca's cardigan by Mr Smith showing me how to use the pipette tool on photoshop. I used contrasting colours ( white on the black, blue with peach, white with peach) next to each other so it would be easier for the reader to see what I wanted to stand out. I found it easy working out how to use the layers and how to move things around so that sped things up a bit, I had some basic idea on how to use photoshop from doing art at gcse, but that was more editing photos and scanning things in so not really the same sort of area, I think i did okay for a first attempt at making a magazine cover though :)

Film AS Preliminary Task

The task we were given was to create a short film showing somebody walking through a door, sitting down at a table and having a few lines of dialogue with the person in the room.
We were given another groups storyboard to create our film from. I was acting in our film being the person in the room who saw a spider, hence the scream, then sat at a desk waiting for someone to come in. I filmed the scene with megan walking down the corridor, and edited the first few scenes

This is the storyboard we were given.

I found that it was important that we had a storyboard as that was basically what we had to follow and what shots to use and the story. The one we were given wasn't very easy to follow because the directions weren't very specific and the pictures weren't exactly top notch so we we didnt have a direct set of instructions on how to make the film, it also didn't make sense because realistically if you screamed when you saw a spider, you wouldn't then sit in a room n your own at a table on the off chance somebody might come in, baring that in mind we tried to stick to it as best as we could. The strengths i had whilst doing this was acting in front of the camera, and working the camera. The weaknesses were that we didn't know how to use the editing software on the mac, and we had to re film some scenes because we'd done the shot over the wrong shoulder.



This was our final production :)