EVALUATION - Question 4 and 5

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? How will you attract/address your audience?
Our media product will be distributed mainly on the internet, via social networking sites such as Facebook (which could be used advantageously like a tie-in as we use Facebook in our thriller), and video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. YouTube is a great medium to spread the word as everyone is familiar with it and is the most popular of video-sharing sites. Many student films such as ours are uploaded to YouTube, for example the following:

This is Memories by Radoslaw Sienski, a short student film that has been nominated for and won quite a few short film awards. At time of writing (6th April 2011) it has accumulated 41,123 YouTube hits since its date of upload in January 2010. It was first embedded on Facebook a few days after first being uploaded, so its first views would have probably originated from people sharing the video online with friends. This is similar to our thriller which we will be sharing online hoping to gain a wider audience.

By uploading our thriller opening to YouTube, we could see similar statistics to this example for our own video, which can gives us an idea of what audience we are reaching. For this example, we can see that the short film Memories is most popular with males aged 45-54, which I think is probably because they can identify somewhat with the character in the film. However, these audience statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt as not all YouTube users input their real date of birth for their account. Furthermore, users are able to watch videos on YouTube without an account, so data cannot be collected for all users. We can also see that this short film has reached global viewers which is another reason why YouTube is a great medium.

Facade...

...uploaded to YouTube

...uploaded to Vimeo

...embedded in Blogger

...shared via Facebook

By using social networking and video sharing sites, we will be able to reach our target audience, which is teenagers and young adults that use the internet regularly and have social networking integrated into their everyday lives. It can be a very succesful way of advertising new media products such as our thriller opening because of this ability to instantly connect to people all over the world.