THE VOLUNTARY BUTLER SCHEME Tabasco Sole SINGLE RELEASED 29th JUNE 2009 ON SPLIT RECORDS
Tabasco Sole is the new single from The Voluntary Butler Scheme, aka 23-year old West Midlander Rob Jones. Think of The Jackson 5’s I Want You Back crossed with a Mellow Gold era Black County Beck through Jim Noir’s psych tinged observations, and you’re not far off the poptastic sound of this boombastic track.
London - May 13, 2009
Rob composed the track on Christmas day (after dinner, and having listened to a Motown compilation with assorted family members) and recorded it, like the rest of his output, on his ultra-basic home set-up in Stourbridge ("just a bedroom full of wires and keyboards.")
On the B-side there are treats aplenty in new track Split, an ace Akira The Don Mix of Tabasco Sole and a wonderfullz ramschackl cover of the Giorgio Moroder/Phil Oakey classic Together in Electric Dreams. The single will later be found on The Volontary Butler Scheme's debut album, The Volontary Butler Scheme at Breakfast, Dinner, Tea, which is currently being mixed and will be released in July.
The Volontary Butler Scheme's previous singles have been championed by the NME, BBC Radio1, 2 and 6 music and XFM, and Rob has played sessions for Huw Stephens, Marc Riley,Dermot O' Leary and Jon Kennedy. Declared "one to watch" in publication as diverse as Q magazine and The Sun, even that old nutty boy Suggs has stepped out and declared himself a fan.
As for the name, it comes from Rob's time living near Bourneville, where voluntary work schemes were set up for laid-off workers Rover workers at the Longbridge pant..."I imagined a voluntary butler scheme - it made me laugh for about 10 seconds - and I haven't laughed at it since!" Rob says.
A while ago I wrote about the kind of jobs PR people do in and for the movie industry. As I already stressed, in my opinion the most common and popular job for a PR practitioner is becoming a publicist.
In the previous post, I described the job profile, pro's and con's and everything that goes with being a publicist, but for the people who want to now specifics, I suggest you to watch the film ''How to loose friends & alienate people'' (2008); I don't want to tell you what's the film about as I strongly think you should see it for yourself, but one of the main characters in the movie is actually a publicist, played by Gillian Anderson, and the role matches perfectly everything that a publicist should be and should do for a client, so if you're interested in knowing more about it, just check out if the film is still played in your nearest cinema or displayed on the shelves of your local DVD rental store.
* Another main character is British actor Simon Pegg, the one starring in the hit film ''Shaun of the dead'', so that should be a guarantee that you're going to be cracking up during the whole movie as I did.
Here I am posting about funny movie cliche's again. If anyone is interested in where I found info about movie cliche's you can click here.
Today I'm giving you a few cliche's concerning TAXI'S; did you ever notice how film characters never really pay the taxi drivers, or if they do, they miraculously always have the exact change, and movie people always get the cab right away, unless they are in danger and that's when suddenly no free cab can be found and the characters either die or steal somebody's car and run away.
Some of my previous posts where mostly on marketing techniques to create brand awareness, film awareness and what kind of PR stunts were and are successful; when writing about the latter, I started thinking about what is to be considered a PR stunt exactly and that's how a name dawned on me: the controversial documentary director Michael Moore. Some people consider him the master of revealing the truth behind modern social controversies while others despise him for his ''straight in the face'' ways and attempts of establishing his point of views as objectified facts; I consider him the modern master of successful PR.
For all the people who are not too familiar with Moore's work, i will summarize for you why exactly the man got to be world-wide famous. Moore is a film maker and author, who explored, mainly by shooting documentaries, the social issues of globalisation, corporations, Iraqi war, gun ownership, George W. Bush, and the American health care system; Time magazine included him in the 2005 100 most influential people in the world, and in the same year he even started his own film festival, the Traverse city film festival in Michigan. Since then, he's been living and working in Traverse city on his new projects.
Michael Moore's most famous documentaries are ''Bowling fr Columbine'', ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', and ''Sicko''. I'm not going to waste any time buy describing you what the documentaries about as you can read about it just clicking on the names of the documentaries above, but what I want to focus on is the way Moore made these documentaries world-wide known, as whether you hate it or loved it, almost every person who has heard of Moore and his work either love him or hate him, and isn't that the goal of any successful PR: making the public know what you're doing in order to get them to come and see your work. As ''Bowling for Columbine'' won an Oscar for Documentary Feature in 2002, and became the highest-grossing mainstream-released documentary, a record later held by ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', we can say that Moore was more than just successful in getting the audiences to see his work as all his documentaries enjoyed and enjoy both commercial and critical success.
Starting with ''Bowling for Columbine'', I will just give you a few examples of how Moore cleverly used some elements in his documentary in order to create controversy, which attracted media attention, which attracted public attention. In this documentary, Moore explores the subject of gun ownership among American citizens; also, he related the issue with the Columbine high school tragedy, as the 2 teenage murderers in Columbine owned guns easily purchased, and bullets they came across in a K-Mart store; apart from making the whole documentary sort of a PR stunt as he interviews Marilyn Manson, a controversial singer linked to the massacre by the media when it came out that the 2 killers were big fans of this guy's music, and it is well-known that the appearance of Marilyn Manson anywhere raises many issues in itself, he then went on to meet up and and attack Charlton Heston, the notorious actor, as back at the time he was the president of the American National Rifle Association. But what really got Moore plenty of publicity, was taking 2 teenage survivors from Columbine, and getting them to K-Mart to return the bullets they were wounded with, a very clever move which certainly wasn't meant to help psychologically the 2 kids, but it ended up being very useful in getting plenty of media coverage as the event drew the attention of virtually everyone. Here you have 2 short videos which aren't meant to refer to the Columbine massacre or the issue of guns, but just to give you an insight of Moore's style and the way he used these 2 celebs in his documentary.
So here we got a delicate subject as gun ownership and the Columbine high school massacre, an interview with one of the most controversial celebrities of our time, Marilyn Manson, Charlton Heston in the role of the bad guy of the documentary, and a PR stunt involving 2 real victims of a terrible tragedy; all elements very useful in creating big buzz.
Passing on to ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', which explores the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and heavily criticizes the American president Bush by linking his family to some prominent Saudis, and already we have a good element to provoke plenty of controversy and attention; this 2005 documentary was put in the centre of attention even before being released. Disney, the owner of Miramax pictures which is the company that produced the documentary, was accused by Michael Moore to have blocked the release of his film 1 day ahead of it's official release date. A long dispute, through the media, took place between Moore and Disney, just until it was proved that Disney warned Moore a whole year ahead of the time that Moore even started shooting Fahrenheit 9/11, that they wouldn't distribute the documentary as they didn't want to get into political controversies.
Here's a video where Moore gets the People's choice best movie awards for ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', and I'm asking you, is it really people's choice best movie awards of 2005, or is it just the film that got the most attention movie awards of 2005?
Sicko, on the other side, which was released in 2007, takes Mr. More to a whole new level as not only he stages a perfect PR stunt, but as he already did in ''Bowling for Columbine'', he uses very smartly real tragedy victims in promoting his views about the American health care system.
This time Moore makes real propaganda against American pharmaceutical giants and health care insurance company and he does it by taking a few Ground Zero survivors to Cuba for medical treatment; smart move but what for? To prove that Cuba has an excellent health care system? Does it? Or to help people in need of assistance like the Ground Zero survivors? Or to prove how the U.S. health care system is broken by taking a tragedy victims to an American antagonist country like Cuba to get proper health care? Or is it just that Michael Moore knows publicity, PR stunts and how to get his projects on cover pages of newspapers and in the evening news by shaking up things just a tiny little bit?
I do admit leaving out a few more controversies and PR stunts concerning Moore and his documentaries but there's just not enough space for it, so I want to leave you with a final thought; as I already stated, Michael Moore is a persona you either love or despise and that might depend on someone's personal sensibility, political views, social role and status, religion, nationality and plenty other factors that influences us in forming opinions, but what I really want to say is that in the end of the day, almost all of us know who Michael Moore is and almost all of us have an opinion on the man's work. Is it just good PR? I leave the answer to you. Here's a Michael Moore appearance on CNN regarding his troubled relations with the media.
Ok, by now you should've got the idea of what PR stunts are and how they're done to promote movies and films as part of marketing and publicity campaigns.
Certainly the good side of putting up PR stunts is creating, in an easy and quick way, media frenzy and buzz around the project the stunt is based on. As I posted previously, the film history is full of examples of successful publicity stunts which resulted in immediate press coverage and eventually in public attention and box-office earnings.
But what if a PR stunt doesn't really turn the way it was supposed to? Is bad publicity always to be considered just more publicity or can it really turn in real bad publicity and poor results?
Thinking about it I did some research looking for cases where a PR stunt didn't really work out as it was suppose to; on January 29, 2007, what was to be a buzz-building PR campaign for the Cartoon Network's movie ''Aqua teen hunger force colon movie film for theatres'' , turned out into a city lock-down under terrorist attack threat. The campaign involved small circuit boxes with images of a Mooninite (an alien from the show's cast) placed for 3 weeks in major U.S. cities, and the Mooninite was depicted giving the middle finger to drivers.
A few Boston citizens reported the boxes to the police which resulted in calling out bomb squads, closing down 2 bridges and roadways for hours, as well as alerting the Pentagon and the U.S. Northern Command.
This is what Dave Morgan, a marketing expert, had to say on the stunt:
''If the objective of the campaign was to get the attention of the citizens of Boston -- and the entire country -- mission accomplished! If part of the objective was to enhance a client's brand -- massive failure! A great family-oriented brand has been damaged in an incalculable way, and significant monetary damage could follow via compensatory damages, fines and legal fees." (www.imediaconnection.com)
Hopefully a good lesson is to be drown from this event; bad publicity isn't always just another way to gain attention and as good as good publicity, as sometimes, if PR stunts and marketing/PR strategies aren't carefully planned a disaster and complete failure can come out of it. So be aware.
The video above is meant to be a little teaser to get your attention on the book I'd like to introduce to you and possibly make you read, and if I did get your attention by now this is what I want to ask you: ever wanted to achieve fame? ever wondered how fame, once achieved, is kept at it's highest peak? why are we so attracted to famous people? or to fame just for the sake of it?
Mark Borkowski, a British publicist, delivers us a book on the fame industry, through the silent movies of the 20's to the internet era and the instant news ways of today; the book offers an insight on the world of fame, exploring and putting the highlight on the most creative stunts and practices that publicists used to promote people, movies and products throughout history.
We're talking about the genius professionals who came up with the idea of insuring Betty Grable's legs for $ 1 million, which obviously created a real media frenzy around the movie she was in at the time, the people who restrained Tom Cruise from his love of bouncing on sofa's on TV, the people who dressed Marilyn Monroe in a potato sack for a photo shoot and you have a picture of it right here:
Mark Borkowski also came up with a fame formula which apparently guarantees anyone to reach true fame and make their name noticed in the media, but I'm not going to give you the formula even though I know you're dying to know it, for that you will have to run to the store and grab the book, and for those who are not that excited about the book, just scroll down and play the video I uploaded of Mark talking about his controversial book and explaining the formula on Channel 4 News.
Posting previously about marketing which is strictly related to PR, as in my opinion there is no marketing strategy that works without including some PR techniques in it and there is no effective PR if it isn't based on some basic marketing tactics, the way it is more and more applied to the movie industry takes me towards exploring how PR is related to this industry by taking a look at the biggest PR stunts done in the history of Hollywood, as I think giving practical examples of how things were, are and are about to be done, is more useful in the process of understanding PR practice in the film world rather then just theorizing on what exactly a PR practitioner or publicist role is in this entertainment sector.
The fact is that the movie industry has never been shy about self-promotion; if we think about something as prominent as the Oscar ceremony, it is an awards which was established in order to get press coverage for the diva's, stars and film screen charmers of the day.
Cleverly-orchestrated PR campaigns have had a crucial role in promoting movies which eventually resulted in films' box-office success as the media coverage that the PR stunts would get, had the main goal of attracting the audiences attention and getting them in the theatres to see the movie which the campaign would revolve around, no matter whether the film was actually of good quality, interesting or appealing to the masses in the first place.
Here is a short list of the PR stunts in the history of Hollywood and the film industry in general up to this day.
Legendary publicist Russell Birdwell generated a buzz around this motion picture by arranging for a dozen of Zenda (Ontario) citizens to attend the world premiere of the film in New York City. If we take in consideration that the film eventually went on winning 2 Oscars we can say that the publicity stunt certainly helped into getting the movie massive media coverage.
Even in this film Birdwell had it's geniality involved as both the director and him created huge media buzz at the time, when announcing they were going to hold open auditions around the U.S. to search for a perfect Scarlett, the main character in the Margaret Mitchell's novel ''Gone with the wind'' and soon to be a movie. Eminent stars like Lana Turner and Katherine Hepburn attended the audition with no success, as the role was swept away by at that time little known Vivien Leigh, an actress that managed to make history by playing the role of Scarlett O'Hara.
The movie was actually a musical, talking about an agriculture professor securing a movie role for his trained mule called Shirley. To promote the movie, the film publicist led Shirley, with an ad for the movie on her back, to walk down Fifth Avenue and enter the restaurant overlooking Rockefeller Plaza's ice rink, a stunt which secured plenty of column inches in the papers the next day.
This comedy was about a newspaper editor, starring Clark Gable and Doris Day. To promote the movie, Paramount Pictures filmed 50 newsmen sitting at a desk, and gave a few of them lines in the film. The sole purpose of getting in the movie Hollywood reporters was to make them focus and write about the movie, which resulted in pure success as the movie received 2 Oscars that year and was placed on the New York Times 10 best movies list of 1958.
Columbia Pictures told the director of this movie to film an alternate, happy ending as the original one was rather dark; later on this was turned into a publicity opportunity by bringing in an audience and giving them cards with thumbs up and thumbs down to vote for the ending they prefer, and the whole thing did get on the mouths of a lot of people as it never happened before that the audience got to chose the ending of a movie.
The producers of the movie thought of a unique way of getting a buzz in the media; before the movie was released, they spread the word that the footage of the documentary-style movie was actually real and discovered after 3 film students, searching for the so-called Blair Witch, disappeared in the woods of Maryland.
The stunt worked as the film made it to the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest earnings in relation to the movie budget as the movie cost only around $ 35,000 and it earned about $ 140 million at the box office, only in the U.S. I'm posting for you both the kind of footage that was spread through internet and made believe to be real by the producers of the movie as well as the official trailer which obviously came out once it was known that the whole documentary was actually a movie.
Even though using a world-wide known celebrity to draw attention on a movie isn't really anything we already didn't heard of, in this case the originality of the idea that the producers of the movie had was in using Paris Hilton, who starred in this horror, in an original way: they printed and put on sale t-shirts advertising the death of Paris the 6th of May, which was the date of the official release of the film. Even though the film didn't earn much at U.S. box office, it did have success over seas.
British actor Sacha Baron Cohen played a Kazakh journalist in this comedy and what he did to raise attention was trying to enter the White House, dressed as Borat, the Kazakh weird journalist, and invite American president George W. Bush to the screening of the film. Even the Kazakh government reacted to the numerous publicity stunts that Cohen performed to publicise the movie release and warned that the horrible character played by Cohen didn't represent properly the values and ways of the Kazakh people. No need to say that the implication of the Kazakh Government resulted in gaining even more press coverage and eventually the movie was a huge success throughout the globe.
Here's a video showing you exactly what happened when Borat went campaigning to promote the movie.(I do apologize for the subtitles)
So, I already posted on how much marketing influences and uses the film industry as another promoting tool and brand awareness strategy and I left you with the question whether movie plots and production adjust to the needs of the marketing plan of the movie sponsors these days, rather than using movies to explore a certain subject, issue, portray characters and people or describe the way we used to be and the way we are.
Well let's start from the beginning of the whole story; in the early days of television various companies would act as an insurance back up for shows, and so for example ''soap opera's'' got the adjective from their washing powder sponsors; or ''Wings'', the first movie ever to win a best picture Oscar award back in 1927 contained a publicity for Hershey's.
The 1980's saw the explosion of the practice of product placement in blockbusters, such as showcasing futuristic cars in the hit trilogy ''Back to the future'' or featuring trainers from a famous shoe company in the indipendent movie ''She's gotta have it'' by Spike Lee.
By the end of the 80's a new, more subtle and harder to spot approach to advertising through movies was to be used, such as cultivating relationships with prop-masters who eventually use your product when accessorising a movie set, as in the Apple case which is mentioned in the interview that follows; just to give you a quick overview on how this kind of product placement works, I'm posting part of an interview done with a famous US prop master knick named Charlie Props (Charlie Guanci, Jr), working on legendary shows and movies such as'' Miami Vice'', ''Bad Boys'' and currently on air ''Burn notice'', as he explains the way this kind of product placement works:
Does product placement affect you at all and what you choose?
CG: It does, a great deal. In television it’s very difficult to get stuff right away, quickly, because there’s a whole protocol in getting people to respond back to you and how they work. I deal with product placement companies who will send me sunglasses for the actors to wear. There’s not brand recognition on that so we have to be careful the network how we use like a Heineken beer bottle. We gotta go clear that then they have to authorize us to use it and make sure the network doesn’t have any Budweiser advertisements conflicting with that. And that takes time, it could take a week, it could take a month. I know there’s been things that we haven’t still gotten clearance on and there’s stuff we would like to clearance on that you’d think they’d just say “no problem” and we can’t just stick it in there so we use generics.
As a prop guy, why is Apple in every single TV show out there?
Is Apple product placement easier to deal with than say Dell?
CG: It depends on the situation and the time of year. If it’s big season, in television, when there’s a lot of shows and a lot of features, they only have so much merchandise that they can let go out. They don’t have just warehouses full of stuff. If I call product placement, they may have ten or fifteen laptops or ten or fifteen handsets available that they have to put on all of these shows, so they are limited on their volume of equipment. But, they’d make a great product, I have an Apple computer. [laughter]
*You can read the whole interview by clicking here.
Another type of partnership common these days is the kind we find in Olivier Assayas's ''Summer hours'', a French movie promoting the famous Parisian D'Orsay museum; since the museum didn't have the money to invest in the movie, they came with an alternative idea by letting the crew use some of the pieces exposed in the museum as part of their set design and by letting the crew shoot in the museum at a reduced rate; the result was as efficient as if they invested in the movie, and that is great publicity and promotion throughout the world.
After this brief historical review on product placement and promotion through movies, what is certain is that there is no indication or warning of the heavy influence exercised by the movie sponsors and backers on the movie script, and therefore the new heavily disguised marketing methods used these days should make us be more aware of who is financing the movies as much as who's starring in it and shooting it.
Now I know for sure that the next time I will go to the cinema I will pay a lot more attention on both the beginning and ending movie credits.
Even though we can all laugh at the way films are commercialised today, seems that the tendency of placing strategically logos and brand names in movies is one of the most popular ways of publicity today.
Think again about James Bond, a character I love to mention in this blog, and how every time he's in deadly peril he has the time to check what time it is on his Omega watch while reaching for the keys of his Aston Martin, named the coolest car in Britain this year, and beating for the 2nd year in a row Iphone in terms of popularity brand.
This sort of blatant commercialism isn't new in the movie industry but what is surprising, is the new approaches and to what length brand managing and marketing strategies are taken to, in order to publicise a certain product.
Eurostar, whose old home at Waterloo (London site) was featured in the final ''The Bourne Ultmatum'' sequel last year, announced its move to St. Pancras (London site) by paying for ''Somers Town'', Shane Meadows's new film.
The advantage of financing a movie is having control over how and where place and publicise own brands and products, therefore Eurostar certainly new that it is cheaper and worthwhile to make a low budget film than to pay for product placement in a blockbuster.
Once the film was completed, the cross-channel train company used an agency to approach distributors and make a plan on how to present the film to the public, and Eurostar made it clear that their main objective was to create brand awareness rather than box office returns. However the movie got good publicity in advance when the Meadows movie was accepted at the Berlin Film Festival receiving favorable reviews.
Nevertheless the numerous plugs for Eurostar are easily spotted in the movie, and to some extent tedious, such as stressing how long it takes from London to Paris with the Eurostar and placing posters for the company in the background of many key scenes.
The key question is: today, does the movie evolve around the idea of promoting a brand or does a brand look for a way of fitting into a movie lot in order to increase brand awareness?I will try to go deeper analising the way the marketing business is influencing the film industry today in the next post, meanwhile I'll leave you with the ''Somers Town'' official trailer.
''When you enjoy something, you must never let logic get in the way. Like the villains in all the James Bond movies; whenever Bond breaks into the complex: 'Ah Mr. Bond, welcome, come in. Let me show you my entire evil plan and then put you in a death machine that doesn't work.'' Jerry Seinfeld, ''Sein language''
Today I decided I should lighten up the tone of this blog by adding a few new monthly fun bites such as this one: movie cliche's, such as the one Seinfeld mentions in the caption above; apart from making us often laugh and becoming the definers of certain movie genres, movie cliche's or certain plots and gimmicks are often used as part of a PR's strategy to attract the audiences attention by humoring them; just to give you an example think about the newest James Bond movie, ''Quantum of solace'' where the fact that the famous Martini drink which Mr. Bond used to enjoy in was replaced buy a much less glamorous Coca Cola for sponsoring reasons; let's just say that according to my opinion all the bad publicity that was generated due to the change of the cliche' Bond drink, apart for sponsoring issues, was also was used to attract attention both of the media and the audience; and I admit it, I did watch the movie just to see what Mr. Bond looks like while sensually enjoying a glass of Coca Cola.
This type of cliche', a certain brand of drink that a main character always consumes, is part of the product placement cliche's; just to mention a few others of this type such as when a hero is in the presence of a company logo time will stand still; or when a character picks up a glass of whiskey or a pack of cigarettes, you will always be able to see clearly the label.
So, one day some of these cliche's might inspire us to create a great campaign to attract everyone's attention when a movie gets out, so don't skip the fun corner posts..
After looking at a general overview of the film industry, what I'm interested in is looking at what can a PR practitioner actually do in the field of film production and industry, what PR jobs are out there in the glittering world of the entertainment, movie stars and red carpets?
Press and publicity in general represent a vital role when it comes to marketing a film, getting it out there and making it known to the audiences that it's out and worth to be seen.
There are several job profiles in the film industry which PR practitioners might be interested into, and all of them require dealing with the media in one way or another.
I don't won't to give you just a list of typical PR jobs in movies as I am more interested in profiling the kind of work a PR specialist is called to the when it comes down to marketing a movie, that is the role of the publicist.
A publicist, in general, is a public relation professional who manages a client's image in the eyes of the public, by getting good press (or sometimes even bad press will do as well) for their client in all the media outlets. A good publicist will know all the editors, TV reporters and journalist who have the power to change a person/company image in the public eyes, as well as just being able to draw attention and put the focus on whatever the product is. But what do publicists exactly do, how can they succeed and how do you break into this business? The answer is to follow.
1. Job description
There are many ways of pitching a good story to the media; press releases are one of them and the good thing about it is that you get to reach all the media very fast and potentially, you get them interested right away if you have a good story up your sleeve.
Another very effective way of getting your story out there is by cultivating good working relationships with editors, TV news producers, journalists and so on, therefore networking with the media is essential. What is important is that these same good relations with the media might come very useful in times of crisis, and that is when the image of our client is threatened, and that is the time you will need good publicity and an opportunity of rebuilding a damaged image in the media.
In addition, publicists also handle interviews with the cast when working for a movie production, or with the client if we're talking about actors and celebrities as individuals; they organise press tours, work on marketing strategies such as publicity stunts, and deal with any other aspect that involve the media in general.
2. Required skills for the job
First of all you have to think like a journalist. Publicists need journalists as much as journalists need publicists therefore it is essential to know exactly what a media representative wants and needs to do his job, and the job you want him to do; that means that if we are to set the agenda of what a journalist is to write about, we have to know what he might find interesting and exciting; therefore excellent communication skills are needed.
Another thing that is essential is being a ''people's person'', outgoing, know how to network and know how to menage your relationships to get the best out of it.
Patience and flexibility are essential as well, as being able to deal with crisis and emergencies at any time.
3. Becoming a publicist
As written/oral communication skills are essential, a degree in journalism, PR, communication is very useful.
Getting experience is the first step to work your way up the ranks; internships for marketing/PR agencies are the best way to start to understand how to work and deal with the media as well as learn how to promote and spread the news.
The next step is building up your networks which eventually will get you the job you want, the media coverage you need, and the inside knowledge of the industry you're working for.
By now you should've got the idea of what is a publicist and what is his/her job, but if you need more info, click here and it will get you to a Q&A with a publicist who talks about the job in a more detailed way.
In addition to that, as being a publicist isn't the only PR job in the film industry, here are some websites on PR jobs available, and PR agencies which deal with the film industry, as such info gives you an idea of the PR work needed in this sector:
Trying to write about and describe the concept of today's film industry and how does it work requires writing about the history of it, the way it developed through the decades, the way it functions and it is perceived differently from continent to continent and from country to country, so I do think it's a little bit too ambitious trying to summarize it all in a post in a clear and informing way.
Therefore all I can give you and want to give you are a few facts I find interesting about the industry today, focusing on a few key points of film production which are relevant to this blog.
Today, the major businesses of film making are located in the U.S., India and China but nevertheless, due to production and infrastructure costs, most of the films are shot in countries like the U.K., Canada, Eastern Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
The history of film is about a 100 years old and through the decades, films developed from purely entertaining novelty to an important tool of communication which has a huge impact on arts, technology, politics, economy and almost every other aspect of the society. For an extensive insight and detailed description on when and how the first motion picture was made click here and here I give you the first film ever made in history:
One of the major film centres today is obviously Hollywood. However, very curiously, most of the major film studios are owned by East coast companies. Only the Walt Disney Company and Sony Pictures are headquartered in California. As for the Hollywood movies we all know that from the start, Hollywood and it's system imposed itself as one of the more prolific, active, and influencing industries world-wide.
American films are divided into 2 categories: blockbusters and indipendent films. In order to remain profitable, every year studios rely on a few extremely expensive releases which are based upon factors like star power and massive advertising in order to attract huge audiences and remain profitable. These movies are supplemented by lower budget production usually based on niche targeting, and which success depends on critical praise; these films are more innovative, creative and of higher quality in terms of plot, acting and directing than the blockbusters.
Another significant development was the rise of the home video market in the late 80's which opened a vast new field for exploitation and a new way of reaching the audiences especially for the lower budget productions.
Now, as I already stressed, this was just a little introduction to the history and facts of the film industry, there is so much more to it that it's just impossible for me to fit it all in a post, so I did a little research and came across some really good sites on the movie industry in general, Hollywood, Bollywood, British film industry and other links you might find useful.
PR AND THE FILM INDUSTRY, if you google it, I can assure you not much will come up apart from a few articles and news bits published in PR Newswire, talking about the film industry in general; not something I am interested in.
You will discover very soon what this blog is exactly about, as I do intend to post as frequently as possible in order to get your attention on the subject and encourage you to comment on anything you agree or disagree with. Being foremost a PR student, but also a film buff and cinema lover, the question about the existing relations between the movie industry and the PR industry appealed to me as an interesting topic to blog about, as there are actually not many people or studies addressing this particular issue.
Not to beat around the bush too much, what I'm interested in is to discover how much PR practice affects a certain film production, it's distribution and final earnings at the box offices; can we really say that the public decree the success of a film over another or are the publicity stunts and specific marketing and PR tactics used to promote a certain production to grant millions at the box offices? Most importantly, if certain productions are granted success to some extension due to good PR and marketing strategy, does that mean that we get to choose only among the well publicized films, and if they're well marketed who and why decides to try to focus the audiences attention towards one particular production?
I don't know the answer to any of these question but i will try to comment on facts and figures existent concerning the film industry in order to establish the nature of the relations between PR and film throughout the last few decades.
I graduated PR, media, publicity in Italy just to move to England and join a MA in PR. Hopefully by the end of the course I will have the right skills to enter the world of PR through the main door.
