Media Studies Revision Cards

Where producers push media at us and we recieve and consume it

Whereby we decide what we want to do with the media and assess it in ways which suit us

Pirates of the Caribbean had made a lot of money on the opening week of the premiere, but is that because of it being well marketed or is a great film? 

Things included with production, and sucess of films 

• Director
• Actors
• A strong Script/Narrative

Goes as far to say that new media erodes the boundary between producer and audience to the extent that it makes little sense to talk about media audiences at all anymore - he calls this rethink 'media studies 2.0'

In July 2002, FilmFour disbanded; film production was once again overseen by Channel 4 and the budget was cut by two thirds.

(The man chiefly responsible for this was Mark Thompson, who later replaced Greg Dyke as the Director General of the BBC in 2004) 

It's role as a distributor was ended. The closing of FilmFour as a stand alone film operation seemed to confirm the impossibilty of Britian achieving a sustainable film industry. The history of FilmFour exemplifies the specific problems facing Britsh producers and distributions. 

FilmFour played an important role in the distribution of films which British audiences were unlikely to have access to otherwise, to cinemas and on video and DVD. FilmFour also funded FilmFour lab, whose aim was to develop 'singular' voices through short films and low-budget feature films. 

• 1984 - Working Title founded by Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe
• First investment: £500,000 in My Beautiful Laundrette, the first of a series of collaborations with Channel Four Films
• Only 15 films produced in the 1980's
• 1988: Production deal with PolyGram Filmed Enterainment
• 1991: Working Title sets up a Hollywood office, developing production deals with Tim Robbins (Bob Roberts, UK/USA, 1992 and Dead Man Walking, UK/USA 1995)
• 1992: PolyGram (a European music and media company) buys Working Title. Sarah Radclyffe leaves to set up her own production company and is replaced by the American producer, Eric Fellner.
• 1998: PolyGram is brought by Unversial, a seagram company
• 2000: Seagram is brought by Vivendi, the French multimedia conglomerate.
• Working Title is now owned by Universal, which is in turn owned by Vivendi.
• The deal with Universal allows Working Title to greenlight films up to a budget of $35m
• WT2, a low budget, filmaking arm was set up to encourage new British filmmakers. One of the first films produced was Billy Elliot(Stephen Daldry, 1999)