How Promotion Websites for Films Have Improved Over the Years

The first movie trailer was created in 1913 for a film called The Pleasure Seekers. Since then, advertising for movies has taken a million different forms (a over exaggeration, but you get the point). Film advertisements can be seen on billboards, taxis, newspapers, and basically anywhere the studios can fit the movie’s title and release date. Yet, with the price of making a film increasing every year, the need to boost audience numbers increases as well.

With the development of the Internet came advertisements in every crack and cereous of the web. Then, film advertisers had a brilliant idea and started to create websites dedicated strictly to the movie in question. These websites were so groundbreaking because before this time, there was no way to give the intended audience so much information or teasers in order to draw them into seeing the film. One of the earliest (and by far the coolest) websites I have come across for movies from my childhood is the Space Jam website that has been untouched since 1996. Now compared to websites for movies today, such as Scott Pilgrim vs The World, or The Dark Knight the Space Jam website looks like it was created my a middle schooler, but for the time it was created, it was groundbreaking. It also has many of the same features as modern day websites like behind the scenes pictures or an interactive game. It is amazing to see how film advertisement has advanced over the years and it will be exciting to see where the advertisers go from here.

Average Audience Members Criticize Films Through Blogs

Over the past couple of years, blogging as exploded and become a major way for people to express their opinions to the world. This can be both a good and a bad thing. Some people use blogs to either express their opinion on everything under the sun or tell people about what happened in their day. Now I am not saying that anything is wrong with this, but these blogs are not constructive blogs, they do not start conversations or make people discuss. Blogs of this nature should not even be called blogs because the nature of their content makes it appealing to only those people that are close to the author and act more like virtual diaries rather than a forum to discuss opinion on a topic. There are, however, even more sites that do create the critical conversation that makes a blog effective. This conversation is especially valuable to filmmakers because they use the feedback of their audience to create better movies down the line or see what people actually think about a topic their movie covered. In my opinion, one of the best movie blogs/opinion sites is a site called Rotten Tomatoes. On this site viewers rate and comment on movies and many of the conversations and opinions generated are fascinating. For example, take a look on what some people say about one of my favorite animated movies, Up. So do a film maker a kindness and tell them what you think of their work.

Business Gains Success from Low Budget Mocks of High Budget Films

Unlike many other mass medias, such as the internet and books, film is a very hard media for the average Joe to get involved with. Most of the titles that reach the widest audience range are from the major Hollywood studios and other smaller studios are sometimes drowned out in the noise. Yet, every now and again, several normal people form small studios such in the case of The Asylum (an American based film studio). The company was formed in 1997 by David Rimawi, Sherri Strain, and David Michael Latt. Their goal was to create low budget videos that they would release straight to video. At first, the team focused on horror films, but then, after the surprising success of their re-make of War of the Worlds, began to shift more towards ‘mockbuster’ cinema. The idea behind mockbusters is that they are similar to a major title that is due to come out and they are made and release several days before the major title appears in theatres. For example, right before Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest came out, The Asylum released a film called Pirates of Treasure Island. Though they have been threatened with legal action on several accounts due to the similarity of their titles to major ones, The Asylum has reportedly never lost money on a film. The source of this is due to the low budget nature of the films and the numerous annual releases; roughly 10 to 15 titles per year.

Though a good majority of their movies are of the mockbuster genre, The Asylum has greatly expanded their genres from horror, which was their genre focus when they were first created. If you take a look at their upcoming titles list, you will see a large variety of genres. You can see action titles such as Dragon Crusaders which is a medieval era based action adventure that has groundbreaking special effects such as computer generated dragons that breathe fairly realistic fire. There are also thriller movies such as Born Bad which is a thriller that has several reputable actors such as the Twilight Saga’s Michael Welch. Yet, by no means have they abandoned their founding genre of horror. They are actually about to release a movie called A Haunting in Salem which is about, you guessed it, people being haunted and cursed by the ghosts of Salem, Massachusetts. Now although their plots might not be too groundbreaking, The Asylum has been keeping up with the major studios in many respects. For example, A Haunting in Salem was filmed in 3d and is distributed as such. They also have their own blog where they post pictures from the movie sets or just allow people to talk about their movies. In this respect, The Asylum is quickly adapting to the digital world and will no way be left in the dust of the major studios digitally.

Man with a Movie Camera

If you know me at all, you know that one of my greatest passions in life is filmmaking. I first got into film making when I was in middle school when my friends and I would film funny skits on my best friend’s camera phone. One of those videos even included me breaking a 3 inch piece of ice with my head. Though that one particular incident isn’t the smartest in my lifetime, the joy I felt from making those short films lead to me making short films in high school and numerous sketch comedy videos in college.

Though, I have a good amount of experience with the subject, I am always finding new technology being used in film that I can barely grasp. I remember when I first found out about the technology behind green and blue screening (aka chroma keying). The technology behind it is actually simple really. Basically what happens is that the editor tells the computer to ignore all of the green in a shot. The reason the color is either green or blue is because these are the two colors that are farthest away from the human skin tone. If it were the case that you cancelled out a color that was close to the human skin tone then the subject would either disappear or look like some form of ghost. Sometimes, as a matter of fact, you can watch the weather and see the weather map on the meteorologist’s tie because he wore a green tie that day. It took me almost a year to fully understand chroma key which is a fairly basic film technology. Who knows how long it will take me to learn the next one.