AICE Media Studies

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?   The genre of the film is presented to be a comedy that also has some elements of a drama.  Like a comedy, the film mainly tries to emphasize humor and amuse the audience. To get this reaction, comedies tend to exaggerate certain characteristics of the action, language, characters, setting, or plot to provide the humorous effect. In a similar way, we follow conventions of a comedy in which our product centers around Santa losing his job. In situational comedies such as Groundhog Day and Happy Gilmore, the humor is centered around the narrative, by which the main-character is found in unfamiliar circumstances. In this case, a Not-So-Merry Christmas follows situational comedies as Santa Claus’s position to get fired after Christmas Day is regarded as unusual.  By placing Santa Claus in a business environment, it provides humor and irony as his situation highly cont...

To revise our film opening, we enhanced and balanced out the audio so it would become more even. For instance, during the takes when the President of the Board addressed Santa Claus, the audio was uneven compared to the other takes. The "Nick Hallisey" title was moved to the previous clip with the respective actor speaking his lines. We also cut down on a few of the takes that ran on longer. For example, the scene where the entire board reacted to Santa Claus's lack of knowledge of that date was slightly trimmed. We also trimmed off a small part of the scene when the board members left the room.

To distribute our film, we plan to find an independent distributor. This can be done through premiering A Not-So-Merry Christmas at an upcoming film festival to find potential distribution companies. We are most likely going to agree to a profit-sharing model, where the distributor would get a percentage of the total profits made from the film. We expect that the distributor receive around 25 percent of the profits, although this can be negotiated between 10 and 50 percent. The distribution company that decides to use our film would likely present screenings to potential buyers, where they can negotiate their percentage of shares from box office ticket sales. As soon as the film is premiered at the festival we expect our film to be distributed to at least 400  theaters, and up to at least 500 the following week. 60 days after the release of our film the distributor is expected to make A Not-So-Merry Christmas available for rental or purchase on iTunes, Amazon, Redbox, and YouTube, ...

To market A Not So Merry Christmas, we decided to consider using social media advertisements to get the attention of the public. Ideas include writing posts about our film or providing images or posters to draw viewers. For an image or poster to advertise, I decided to use an image from the film and edit it using Adobe Photoshop express. The photos were edited by cropping,  altering lighting vibrancy, saturation,and clarity.  The font was added using Phonto. A business partnership with a well-known company is also helpful to market our film. For example, characters or themes from the movie can be printed on soda cans from the Coca Cola company. Because any people drink sodas from this large industry, having our movie advertised with the soda will grab attention from a wider group of people. An image of our poster could be a traditional movie poster or be used for an internet ad or banner. TV commercials incorporating clips or teasers of the film can be broadcasted by popula...