Monday 9 November 2009

How does the budget of a film institution affect the production practices used to appeal to audiences?

When a film has a low budget, it affects its production practices. For example, Dead Man's shoes, a film produced by Warp Films, and directed by Shane Meadows, had a budegt of three quarters of a million pounds. Because of the low budget, it meant that they couldn't afford to emply lots of well known actors, because they would have wanted high pay. Instead they employed actors that aren't well known, and didn't need such a high wage packet. Furthermore, the production team couldn't afford to create new sets and use extra lighting, so they had to find to find already existing places, and just use natural lighting instead. This gives the film a look of realism, rather than a special effects faked one.

In Shane Meadow's film This Is England, they found that they needed props to make the film appear like it was in the 1980's, but they couldn't afford to splash out on a brand new set, and all the other props required. So instead, they found an area in Nottingham that hadn't been updated since the 80's, and they just edited out the satilitte dishes, and brought a load of cars from the 80's and before off Ebay because it was the cheapest way possible.

When it came to shooting the scenes of the film, rather than going to great lengths to produce a script and then make the actors work to it, Shane Meadows would just create a basic script, and then spend amounts of time with all the actors, planning it out because it was cheaper that way. Even then though, when it came to shooting each scene, a lot of what went into the film was improvised acting.

At the end of the day, because the production team had such a limited amount of money to work with, they were restricted as to what they could do in their film. Because of this, they couldn't make their film appeal to a very wide audience, becausde they couldn't splash out on advertising and a big film premiere. This meant only a small amount of people saw the film, and only in small independant cinemas.

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