Film Distribution

Film Distribution

A film distributor is a company which link the film producers to the people who are going to watch the film. They take films shown in cinemas and make them into DVDs, Videos etc and sell to the public for home viewing.

During the film distribution process, the distributor books a film with the producers, where they see ways to target the audience and market the film.

They then negotiate a percentage of sales for the distributor who create a line of of advertising material and sell the film on DVDs etc.

They are also responsible for dubbing foreign films and adding subtitles.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), is a story about an alcoholic ex-footballer and his wife who he has emotionally abandoned. The drama unfolds when the husband is reunited with his father who’s dying of cancer and a host of memories surface.

It was one of the top ten films of 1958 receiving 6 Oscars, another 2 wins and 8 nominations.

The total gross for the film was $17,570,324.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is highly accesible on DVD from most popular shops I looked at on the internet.

Existing music channel websites

MTV – Homepage

http://www.mtv.co.uk

• MTV (Music Television) was originally a channel specifically for music videos, but now has a variety of shows particularly popular being the reality shows.
• It is aimed at young people, mainly teenagers and older adolescents.
• On the website for MTV is their logo which is placed in the top left corner so it is one of the first things you see.
• The logo is very simple yet effective and has become very recognisable all over the world.

• The background for the website is a light grey and the text is black so that it stands out and is easy to read.
• The primary navigation bar is horizontal at the top of every page. It branches out into more specific links, but the initial category’s are; Channels, Music, Shows, News, Videos, Galleries, Competitions, Games, Downloads, Mobile, Community.
• When the mouse hovers over a category a vertical navigation bar appears giving you more options which relate to the category.
• The layout for the homepage is lots of tables and lines to divide articles.
• It has lots of images and text which make it look exciting and busy, but I think it has too much text and some of the images are too small. It isn’t what you want to see on a homepage which should be simple and not overwhelming.
• Other things included in the homepage that I like are; music video chart, downloads (especially these days), popular searches.
• A good way to navigate around the website is the internal search engine and by using the artist and show browse, which is important for such a complex and detailed website.
• There is an advert which is relevant because it links to Amazon a popular shopping site commonly used for purchasing CDs and other music related items.
• The text and images are set out differently, but aren’t all over the place. In different sections the image and text placing alternates.
• The first thing to catch my eye on the site was the flash animation up the top. It changed every so often between 5 images of different artists and tv show advertisements. There wasn’t a lot of text mainly large eye catching images as well as 5 thumbnails next to it to choose from.

4Music

http://www.4music.com/

• 4Music is the sister channel of Channel 4
• It is aimed at a young audience
• The homepage is a lot simpler than MTV, but is quite effective and not overwhelming
• There is a horizontal navigation bar with; Home, Artists & Tunes, On TV, Free Stuff, Monkey
• The logo is in the top left corner
• There is a one table used which is formatted with the images on the left and the text on the right
• The background is light with contrasting text to make it easy to read
• There is also a weird photo in the background which is a bit distracting and pointless as you can’t even see what it is
• The photos are a good medium size
• There is an advertisement by Orange advertising their indie rock day so is relevant
• The channel covers a wide variety of music genres which are listed at the bottom of the page

Timeline of the Internet

This is a timeline showing major events that have happened over the past 49 years to contribute to the way the Internet is today.

1958 – President Eisenhower requests funding to create the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). This was the forerunner of the ARPANET and the Internet.

31 May 1961 – ‘Information Flow in Large Communication Nets’ gets published RLE Quarterly Progress Report. It’s Leonard Kleinrock’s first paper on Packet Switching. Kleinrock, Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, was a big part of the building and management of the ARPANET, the world’s first packet switched network.

Oct 1965 – Larry Roberts directed the first network experiment which successfully made two computers talk to each other using packet switching.

Dec 1966 – The ARPA project began with Larry Roberts as its chief scientist. Teamed with Leonard Kleinrock, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf they create ARPANET and are responisble for something that was built on to get today’s Internet.

1 Sep 1969 – The first ARPANET node is installed at UCLA Network Measurement Center. Leonard Kleinrock puts the Interface Message Processor to a Sigma 7 Computer. This is the first generation of what a router is today.

1 Oct 1969 – The second node is installed at Stanford Research Institute. The machine sent its first message ‘lo’, the first three letters of ‘login’. Unfortunately, it crashed when they typed in the letter ‘g’, but the bug was fixed and they were able to login successfully.

1 Nov 1969 – The third node is installed at University of California, Santa Barbara.

1 Dec 1969 – The fourth node is installed at University of Utah.