How does a films budget affect its production

Budgets are important to the success of a film. If the production company has a lot of money to spend on the film it’s more likely to be hit because the quality of the production is higher. Warner bro’s are a huge American based company who produces big budget films.

The Dark Knight by Warner Bro’s had a budget of $185 million which is a huge budget on top of that they had $100 million for marketing having this much money allows them to get big name actors that people will recognise making them more likely to go see the film, they can also afford the best technology to produce the film like top CGI animation, explosive fight scenes and futuristic cars. The dark knight was mostly filmed in Chicago, one of America's most famous cities as well as other locations in the UK and Hong Kong to get the best locations Warner Bros needed alot of money.

smaller film companies such as working title team up with bigger companies to get more funding, working title works closely with universal studios who pay for marketing outside of the UK. Hot fuzz had a budget of £8 Million substantially smaller than The Dark knights.

The Dark Knights marketing had a lot of Internet based content, but it also had games and action figures promoting it as well, hot fuzz on the other hand, had t-shirts, video blogs and the usual posters, trailers and interviews, with more money the Dark knight could afford to do that and more.

the dark knight was filmed in huge cities while hot fuzz was film in wells, a quiet countryside town, the complete opposite to the dark knight location wise.

£8 million is still quite a lot of money, it can get you some relatively well known actors and half decent location and pretty good marketing, This Is England, had a budget of £1,500,000. Massively different from both the Dark knight and Hot Fuzz. FilmFour, again, had to team up with another company to get it distributed and marketed outside of the UK, the only marketing in the UK was the normal, posters, interviews and trailers. most of the film was done in abandoned areas of Nottingham. All of the actors in the film are unheard of, this is because the budget was no where near big enough to afford big name actors or even actors like Simon pegg from hot fuzz

the more money a company has, the more likely the film will be a success, having the best locations, best actors and best marketing are vital for pulling in the biggest audience

More idea's + Videos

Like i said in my last entery, i want to do a mystery/comedy. so i've been thinking about what i could do in it, and i want to do somthing like the following test i've done


it took about 20 minutes to do 1 second, so if i was going to do this it'd only be in short bursts, or on still images

I havn't seen watchman but this is my favourite opening i've seen so far, its really simple, but really effective. some openings can be really boring but this one was good because i kept watching and didn't look away for a second despite it being 5 minutes long. the embedding was dissabled again, so link it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=573XmVOdD2Q

i think this opening would have been just as effective without the country music in the background, the music adds a sad mood to it, but if it wasn't there just the scenes on the screen are powerful enough.
i thought it was good how the credits mixed in with the video, i hardly noticed them. i plan on doing someone similar with my opening. i also intend to use music as the base of my opening but something fast paced and a strong beat.

Ideas and More videos

I have a lot of different ideas for my film opening but i'm not sure what genre to do so i'm watching some more videos for inspiration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8hqExgrxQU

This is the hot fuzz trailer, the embedding is disabled so URL will have to do.
i couldn't find the opening sequence so i watched the trailer instead (even though we're watching it in Media now i'd been meaning to watch it at home anyway its one of my favourite films)
i'd like to do something like this with my opening, action, but funny as well



spider man 2 opening titles.
i could do something like this with Sony Vegas, it would take a very very very long time but i've done something similar in my own time before

my idea for my opening is to add my credits/titles into the clips so they are coming out from behind objects



the pirates of the caribbean opening sequence, in which there are no credits and only the title at the very end, its a really effective opening because it gets straight into the action.

im trying to think about the time of year when we start filming so i no what kind of weather there will be, because it would be difficult to do a film about a beach party or something in snow! :D
i have to remember that i've got limited locations and limited people to be in my opening as well as weather and other facts that could affect it, so trying to take all that into consideration, while thinking about genre and an idea is proving to be quiet difficult
i was thinking maybe a mystery/comedy because it would be easy to work around location/people/weather and is a pretty wide genre for ideas

Institutions and audiences

We started a new topic for the exam "Institutions and Audiences" in the first lesson we did a class survey and came to the following conclusions

1. Almost all the films we watch are american made

This is because they are bigger companies in comparison to our British companies and they have much bigger budgets with there films, this is also why British film companies are partnered up with american ones when making a film normally for publicity.

2. we watch films in lots of different ways.

compared to how people used to watch films we have a very broad choice

• TV
• Cinema
• Download
• Youtube (Or other video sharing sites)
• DVD
• Skybox office (or other TV film channels)

3. More genres, hybrid genres.

this is because people dont want to watch the same kind of film over and over so mixing genres and having more genres allows people to keep enjoying films

4. Audience is in control of how, when and where they watch there films.

We did the survey by each filling in a grid that had the headings Film, Certificate, genre, where watched, pro's, Con's and British or American? after we had all filled our grid's in we fedback and put it on the board to so we could see the four points above.

on my own grid i did 8 films heres some examples:

Tranformers 2

• Certificate: 12
• Genre: Action/Fantasy
• Where watched: Cinema
• Pro's: Big screen, good audio
• Con's: No control, disturbances,
• American made

Dark Knight

• certificate: 15
• Genre: Action/Sci-fi
• Where watched: Cinema
• Pro's: Big Screen, Good audio
• Con's: No control, disturbances
• American made

Kung Fu Panda

• Certificate: PG
• Genre: Comady/Animation
• Where watched: DVD
• Pro's: Control, speical features
• Con's: Waiting for release, costs money, may break
• American made

Video openings

I've been watching some video openings for ideas for my own video i've watched some on DVD's at home but these are some of the ones i found on youtube.



This is the opening to the pink panther, i won't be doing something like this because its all animation but its still good because of the way they show the titles so they mix in with animated action, i could do something like this in my own video!



This is the opening to James bond - Golden eye. its a typical Bond opening with all the figures as silhouettes, guns and explosions, again not somthing i could do easily, it is possible with my own softwear to do somthing like this but it would take a long time, you have to do masking frame by frame and it takes forever to do just a minutes worth of clip. I can do the clips overlapping and fading through though!



not a practical opening, it goes on for a very long time before the titles start, but it fits the films genre (Comady/musical) and hooks the audiance in straight away, introduce the main charater and does it all through song! again, this isn't a very good for my video because its long and i can't do musical things

i watched Titanic aswell, but the embedding was dissabled so heres the URL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPQYUVvh2xc

This opening is really simple, its just a montage of old style videos of titanic setting sail for the final time. the opening doesn't need to be anymore then that because its powerful enough as it is, Titanic is the most famous ship wreck in the world so most people know what is going to happen. i could do a simple opening, but it would have to be something people could recognize easily, i could do a shelf of Sherlock Holmes books, or something else most people know about