Production companies help to facilitate the making of, and distributing films and/or television programs. Most often, the production company for films and television provides the money, and thus sets the budget, and may also make decisions on what director, and actors can be hired. Budget often makes other decisions possible or impossible. A low budget film may not be able to be filmed in a remote location, for example.
The company may also come attached with certain actors, directors, or film editors and photographers. Often this is especially the case when it belongs to a major studio, like Touchstone Pictures, which belongs to Disney. Directors who have contracts with Touchstone are more likely to be offered jobs produced by Touchstone.
Role of the distributor
A distributor is generally an organisation who handles the theatrical release of a film in a particular country as well as the marketing and circulation of films for home viewing (DVD, Video-On-Demand, Download, Television etc). Often feature films have different distributors representing them in different territories and different distributors handling the home-viewing circulation.
For a low budget film like ours the funding would most likely come from a government grant from the British Film institute. The BFI invest £26m of Lottery funds per year to support film development, production and distribution activity in the UK and the budget is set to rise to £30m by 2017. Aiming to champion a breadth of bold and distinctive film making across the UK, to nurture new talent and to back the development, production and distribution of films that will enrich UK film culture.
To fund out film the BFI would provide us with the funding for the following:
Feature film production, including international co-production and completion funding
Feature film development, principally script development
Talent development (including funding for short films) via the BFI NET.WORK
Feature documentaries
Production company slate development, via the Vision Awards
Digital and cross-media activity
Distribution of feature films in the UK
International sales of UK feature films and other film export activities
The BFI would most likely involve Film4, I believe this is the perfect choice as Film4 are often eager to work with British led talent or with British content additionally they have a target audience similar to ours (16-30, which would enable them to give us a clear insight on what we need to do in order to attract our said audience. Looking at low budget films by Film4 e.g. trainspotting, this is England both of which turned out to be very successful films and TIE resulting in a TV series
New line cinema logo
For our professional production company we decided to use new line cinema firstly for aesthetic reasons, we found the dark colours helped to reinforce the thriller genre, the almost shadow affect again alludes to the theme of mystery and helps connote the unknown. Secondly New Line Cinema are an established, professional company renown for their successful thrillers such as the cell, seven, fracture, snakes on a plane and many more.
White productions
We came up with the name 'White Productions' as for us it was simplistic and had a professional look about it in order to not distract from the actual theme, also it looks a lot less amateur than if we were to attempt, perhaps make a logo with our own drawings. The logo was done in black and white, this is suitable for our production as the binary opposites connotes good and evil which is of course suited to a thriller, the fact the eye is a woman's represents a femme fatale character although typically villainous, if not morally ambiguous, and always associated with a sense of mystification and unease; themes we deemed particularly important in our thriller. The visual medium here bared significance to the plot and connoting the good and evil important to our film and the black and white also reinforced the binary opposites.
The titles
The titles we decided to use are mostly overlay titles in a white serif font. They appear one by one over the production in the bottom corners of the screen. We chose to use overlay titles as they are simple and don't take too much time out of the film. We felt that when researching into different thrillers, the titles used in 'The Sixth Sense' were quite tedious to watch as they were slow, long and just simple full screen motion titles with nothing particularly interesting or intriguing taking place. We didn't want this to be the case without production.The titles are overlay until the very last one which reads 'BABY' as a full screen motion title. The word is white on a black background as the colours act as a binary opposition for good and evil. This representation would become clearer if we were to continue to make the whole film.
The opening credits in our thriller mention each person involved in our production, each person in our group had several roles so our names were mentioned more than once. The opening credits are shown at the very beginning and list the most important members of the production. They are now usually shown as text superimposed on a blank screen or static pictures, or sometimes on top of action in the show. There may or may not be accompanying music. Using overlay titles we introduced cinematography first, followed by music then the editors, the producers lastly, the Director and actors were shown this is because they are the most important/significant to the film therefore by putting them last as you would in a professional thriller they stay in the audiences mind as they were shown last therefore stay fresh in the mind.
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