Zoe Rutland - Question 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Mainstream or Independent?
I feel our product fits in with both mainstream and independent. The low production values, realistic set with naturalistic lighting and complex plot in which challenges the audience enables it to fit an independent production. However, we’ve made use of stereotypes, such as passive, stressful women who are conventionally the victims in Thriller films, and so this offers ‘Mind Clock’ a more mainstream approach as it makes quite straightforward use of genre conventions.

Our audience feedback showed us our audience prefer both mainstream and independent – the top two choices of music genre were RnB and Indie, and so we tried to include aspects from both independent and mainstream in our opening. However, our film touches on the independent production style more, as it explores universal themes, such as paranoia, in quite a complex way that would attract more of a niche audience, yet the mainstream aspects would still allow our product to reach a wide audience.

We felt Lionsgate would be the perfect distributor for our media product, as it’s the most commercially successful independent film distribution company in North America, and whilst our film consists mostly of independent aspects, it would be exhibited in mainstream cinemas and have a widespread release due to it's cross-over into mainstream.

The money for our film would come from Lionsgate, as their revenues have increased during the past 10 years to $1.6 billion. They’ve recently distributed new Thriller film ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ and major new phenomenon ‘The Hunger Games’, a big budget mainstream film which set the record for the third best opening weekend box office sales of any movie. They clearly have success with their films, which is why they would be the perfect distributor for our film in order for it to reach mainstream cinemas globally.