https://quizlet.com/354561091/csp-chicken-2015-flash-cards/

Funding
Director Joe Stephenson raised £110,000.

Key points:

1. Raised through investment by individuals such as rich friends and contacts
2. There wasn’t a funding body BFI Film Fund was willing to fund Chicken
3. Raises questions about whether film industry is accessible to lower-income filmmakers

Production
Key points for making Chicken:

1. Adapted from a play by Freddie Machin that originally ran at Southwark Playhouse.
2. Filmed in 19 days, almost all external locations so victim to rain, issues with lighting etc.
3. Film produced and distributed by a new company set up by director Stephenson: B Good Picture Company.

Distribution

Chicken’s distribution has been very difficult:

1. No distribution deal secured in 2014
2. Two-year festival circuit won awards and generated interest and critical acclaim for film
3. UK cinema release followed in May 2016. Selected for film subscription service MUBI and acquired by Film4 for TV premiere in April 2017.
4. UK DVD release distributed by Network Releasing (the internet) . Digital distribution in USA/Canada – January 2018.

Promotion

Alongside film festivals, new technology was vital to promoting Chicken to a wider audience: 

1. Some traditional marketing: trailer, film poster with review quotes etc.
2. Social media very important to market film – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
3. Film available on-demand now; Stephenson hoping for deal with Netflix or Amazon Prime to bring in revenue and find wider audience.

Links To theorists:

Hesmondhaughl:

Risky Business-Joe Stephenson didn’t know if the film would be successful or if people would even watch and enjoy it. “All business is risky” “Audiences that use these texts in highly volatile and unpredictable ways” “Impossible to predict how the market will react.”

Television– “hybridisation of television and internet to produce on-demand services” Chicken can be found on-demand now; Stephenson hoping for deal with Netflix or Amazon Prime.

Curran and Seaton:

More diverse media landscape– There wasn’t a funding body for Chicken as it was an independent micro budget film “Media landscape has fallen under the control of a handful of global media conglomerates” (unlike Chicken which was under B Good picture Company)

Livingstone and Lunt:

Cultural production exists in a loosely regulated framework, biased towards a consumers rather than citizen model. Consumer= People who watch things for a self-fulfilling need.

Self Regulation “Independently left to decide upon moral and ethical codes”

Goes against Livingstone and Lunts “consumer based regulation” as it’s a micro budget film that promotes social realism of seeing a different perspective on life through the eyes of a person with a disability and spreads awareness suggesting it’s a citizen based regulation as it’s regulating social and cultural health of society in which they operate.