Marketing campaign for film

Having discussed our movie in huge detail we have decided that there will be a low budget and no stars. There are two reasons for this, one is that it is a documentary and it is being made to look like a student film therefore money won’t be needed and two, using stars will take away from the reality of the documentary. This leads us onto the question of 'How will we market it?' 

Marketing is a huge advantage for films, and the more marketing, the more popular the film you are making is. Unfortunately, without the funding and financial support it will be a lot harder to market our documentary. It would be an Independent production that is co-funded by a distribution company or television channel. Screening it at Sundance film festival would be a huge advantage as this is somewhere where lots of distributors will be and it would get a lot of exposure. The documentary is made for art house film only and wouldn’t be a blockbuster.

The unique selling point of our short mocumentary is that it is about academic performance enhancing drugs and although there have been many films about drug taking and the pressure of school life, there hasn’t been a successful one that focuses on academic performance enhancing drugs. This is an interesting selling point, students should be interested in this subject, but the we aren’t going to market the film around this point, instead around the enigma of the film.  

A good way of marketing our short film mocumentary could be screening the trailer for it before art house movies. This is because the kind of audience that we focus to capture would be in an art house cinema. We could also show the trailer at film festivals as well as on the internet, for example, YouTube. This is a very popular site for teenagers and students.  

The poster that we are making says in large, bold letters, ‘Why Did Ben Collins Die?’. Using a question will capture the audience we need and also by using a personal name and putting it into such a tragic question people will be shocked and want to know what the answer is and who this boy is.