Week 5: Target Audience and Distribution

     Today's post will be a mild detour from our regularly scheduled update and will instead focus on some information that will pertain to the Creative Critical Reflection I'll be completing after we've finished working on the opening itself.  Today I'll be talking a bit about target audience and the distribution options for our short film.
   As discussed in one of my first blog posts, the typical target audience of science fiction films consists of white males between the ages of 18 and 29.  This is reflected in the usual demographics of sci-fi move casts, aka a bunch of white guys, one or two women, and a token black guy.

   
     Aliens (1986) was and still is a pretty rare exception to this rule.  Not only does it have a female main lead, but it also has (gasp) multiple people of color!  They also have names and some of them are quite memorable, even if they didn't survive that long.  Most of the white guys are also either evil or incompetent, so that's a nice change of pace.  It's notable that Aliens is widely regarded as a classic and all-round awesome movie, so its defiance of genre conventions clearly did not do anything to harm its reception.

     Something we have to address in our CCR is the distribution of our theoretical short film.  We need to do this from the standpoint of an amateur film producer, which we are, so doing a worldwide theatrical release is off the table.  The most obvious distribution platform to use is YouTube, as it is the largest video sharing platform on the planet.  It's also frequently used to distribute actual short films, so us using it wouldn't be out of the ordinary.
     Another option is releasing our production at film festivals.  These events can draw pretty large crowds, some of them get a fair bit of attention, and a lot of the time you can win money if there are rewards for best film.  This would be a cool, more professional way to initially distribute our short film, as well as potentially getting us some publicity.  There's actually a film festival today in Miami while I'm writing this, so that's a pretty interesting coincidence.  Or it may not be because of this whole corona virus thing.  I don't know, and I don't really care since either.
     Next week, we'll finally be starting our filming (yay), so expect at least one post on that.  I also finally got to Lucille's, so my next post will be talking about our shooting location.  See you then!