Unit 8: Understanding the TV and Film Industries - Task 3

Contracts, Legal and Ethical Obligations

 

The media industry is a one kind of industry, it is flexible and always changing. This means that the contracts its workers have are more flexible than traditional jobs.

These are some of the most common contracts:

• Full-time, permanent
• Part-time, permanent
• Fixed-term, and freelance
• Shift work
• Office hours
• Irregular and anti-social hours pay
• Salaried
• On completion

 On a full-time permanent contract you work on a full-time basis, usually 39 hours a week. A permanent contract means you are a regular member of staff entitled to company benefits including, pensions, sick pay, maternity/paternity leave and holiday pay.

The job roles most likely to be  full-time permanent are in management, editing, finance, creative and sometimes marketing.

Part-time permanent means you work a fraction of a full-time contract, again with a set amount of hours a week. You will also be entitled to the same benefits as full-time permanent but on a reduced basis due to working fewer hours.

The job roles most likely to ne part-time permanent are in financial and sometimes marketing.

Fixed-term and freelance contracts are similar in that they are both temporary and will only last for a certain period of time. Under a fixed-term contract you may still be entitled to company benefits if outlined in your contract. However, a freelance worker will be responsible for their own arrangements in terms of pension, holiday and sick pay and other allowances.

The job roles most likely to be fixed-term and freelance are in technical, creative and marketing.

Shift work means your hours are set to a certain time of the day., for example 9am-4pm or 11pm-6am. Shifts can include late or night work and are often used in places that need to be manned 24 hours a day, such as broadcasting centres (TV centres/radio centres).

Traditionally, office hours are Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm. This contract is very common for people working in administration.

The job roles most likely to be office hours are in financial, marketing and some assistant jobs.

Irregular and anti-social hours are like overtime, when a person is paid extra money on top of their normal wages for working over or working unsociable hours. This is common in the media industry as production work, especially on location, can be irregular and may involve working very early or late. This pay is an incentive to people to work the unsociable hours beyond their normal contracted duties.

Salaried is a set annual wage that is broken down into monthly payments. A salary will be advertised as: £23,000 per year. This is then divided by 12 to give you the monthly payment of £1,917.

The job roles most likely to be salaried are in management, technical and creative.

On completion is very common in this field of work, especially for people commissioned to do work. The contract outlines what you are to do and by when. You will be paid the agreed fee when the work is completed according to the contract.

The job roles most likely to be on completion are in creative and technical.



 

Written into some contracts are confidentiality and exclusivity clauses.

A confidentiality contract means that you agree to not discuss or reveal any details of the project you are working on to people who are not involved.

An exclusivity contract is when two separate parties agree to work together for a certain period of time prohibiting any of the involved parties from working with anyone else during the contract duration.

Unit 8: Understanding the TV and Film Industries - Task 2

In groups we created a flow chart of job roles in the industry and the different departments. Each department is linked to another through certain people being involved within other departments.

I researched the three job roles:

First Assistant Director (Management)

Title Designer (Technical)

Production Buyer (Creative)

One thing running parallel between the different jobs is a driving license. This makes sense as most shoots take place in different locations. It was interesting to see the differences between the different departments. In management, most of the time no qualification is needed for you to get the job. All that is needed is specific experience in the field of work. All workers in management need in-depth knowledge of up to date health and safety legislation and procedures. In the editing department a degree is necessary. It's advised you have a strong portfolio, this is vital as this is such a highly competitive area. In the art department  there is no formal training or qualification needed. 

Unit 8: Understanding the TV and Film Industries - Task 1

 

Walt Disney Pictures is an American film production company, division of Walt Disney Studios, owned by The Walt Disney Company.  It was founded in 1928, by Roy O. Disney and Walt Disney as Disney Bros Cartoon Studio. The headquarters are in Burbank, California, United States. Its parent organisations are The Walt Disney Company, Walt Disney Studios.

For over 90 years, The Walt Disney Studios has been the foundation on which The Walt Disney Company was built. The Studio brings quality movies, music and stage plays to consumers throughout the world. Walt Disney Pictures is classified as one of Hollywood's "Big Six" film studios.

The studio's first feature-length motion picture was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Animated films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar are also released by Walt Disney Pictures. Walt Disney Pictures has released four films that have received an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination; Mary Poppins (1964), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Up (2009), and Toy Story 3 (2010). The highest grossing film worldwide is Frozen (2003), with a box office gross of $1,279,852,693.

 

 

 

 

Blue Sky Studios is an American computer animation film studio based in Greenwich, Connecticut. The studio was founded in 1987 by Michael Ferraro, Carl Ludwig, Alison Brown, David Brown, Chris Wedge and Eugene Troubetzkoy after the company they worked in, MAGI, shut down. Blue Sky Studios has 600 employees.

Blue Sky Studios has been a subsidiary of 20th Century Fox since 1997. Using its in-house rendering software, the studio had worked on visual effects for commercials and films before completely dedicating itself to animated film production in 2002 with the release of Ice Age.

In 2002, Ice Age was released to great critical and commercial success. The film got a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and established Blue Sky as the third studio, after Pixar and DreamWorks Animation, to launch a successful CGI franchise.

They have had many contributions in popular films and in 2009 improved and upgraded the 20^th Century Fox logo’s animation, adding an extra searchlight and palm trees. This logo was first seen on Avatar.

Unit 8: Understanding the Television and Film Industries - Task 4

I presented a five minute micro teach on a current change in technology within the media industry and discussed how it may affect the industry. My chosen topic was the Lytro Cinema Camera.

A timeline on the changes in technology within the film industry:

Early to Mid 1830's - Moving images were produced on revolving drums and discs with independent invention by  Simon von Stampfer, Joseph Plateau and William Horner.

1867 - The first machine patented in the US that showed animated pictures was a device called the "wheel of life" or "zoopraxiscope". Patented by William Lincoln, moving drawings or photographs were watched through a slit.

1878 - British photographer Eadweard Muybridge takes the first successful photographs of motion, showing how people and animals move.

1885 - American inventor George Eastman introduces film made on a paper base instead of glass, wound in a roll, eliminating the need for glass plates.

1889 - Thomas Edison and W.K. Dickson develop the Kinetoscope, a peep-show device in which film is moved past light.

1895 - The Lumiere brothers patent a combination movie camera and projector, capable of projecting an image that can be seen by many people at once. In Paris, they present the first commercial exhibition of projected motion pictures. They were the first to present projected, moving, photographic pictures to a paying audience of more than one person.

1905 - Cooper Hewitt mercury lamps make it practical to shoot films indoors without sunlight.

1906 - The first animated cartoon is produced.

1910 - Actors in American films began to receive screen credit and the creation of film stars began.  

1911 - Credits begin to appear at the beginning of motion pictures.

1912 - Carl Laemmle organises Universal Pictures, which will become the first major studio.

1915 - The Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera allows directors to make close-ups without physically moving the camera.

1923 - Warner Bros. is established.

1925 - Western Electric and Warner Bros. agree to develop a system for movies with sound.

            The first in-flight movie is shown.

1927 - Warner Bros.'s The Jazz Singer, presents a movie's first spoken words. The Vitaphone method that the studio used involved recording sound on discs.

1929 - The first Academy Awards are announced, with the award for the Best Picture in 1927 going to 'Wings'.

1930 - The motion picture industries adopts the Production Code, a set of guidelines that describes what is acceptable in movies.

1933 - Theatres begin to open refreshment stands.

1937 - Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is released.

1940 - The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs allowed Disney to make more animated features like Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).

1945 - ‘Post-classical cinema’ described the changing methods of storytelling of the “New Hollywood” producers. The new methods of drama and characterization meant the story chronology may be scrambled; storylines may feature unsettling “twist endings”.

1953 - Seven-year contracts with actors are replaced by single-picture or multi-picture contracts.

Early 1960’s - The studio system in Hollywood declined, because many films were now being made on location in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in the UK and Cinecittà in Rome.

1970’s - Filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic images of bloody deaths.

1971 - Marked the release of controversial films like Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and Dirty Harry. This sparked heated controversy over the perceived escalation of violence in cinema.

Mid 1970’s - A new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas.

1972 - Film directors begin to express their personal vision and creative insights. The development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these directors far greater control over their projects than would have been possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and commercial successes, like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Coppola’s The Godfather films, Polanski’s Chinatown, Spielberg’s Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas’s Star Wars.

1976 - The phenomenal success in the 1970s of Jaws and Star Wars in particular, led to the rise of the modern “blockbuster”. Hollywood studios increasingly focused on producing a smaller number of very large budget films with massive marketing and promotional campaigns.

Early 1980’s - Saw audiences began increasingly watching films on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the film studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of films on home video became a significant “second venue” for exhibition of films, and an additional source of revenue for the film industries.

Early 1990’s - Saw the development of a commercially successful independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997), independent films like Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on home video.

1994 - Major American studios began to create their own “independent” production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare. One of the most successful independents of the 1990s, Miramax Films, was bought by Disney the year before the release of Tarantino’s runaway hit Pulp Fiction in 1994. The year 1994 also marked the beginning of film and video distribution online. Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their popularity, with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994).

1995 - The first feature length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney. After the success of Toy Story, computer animation began to grow and became the principal technique for feature length animation, which allowed competing film companies such as DreamWorks Animation and 20th Century Fox to effectively compete with Disney with successful films of their own.

1992 - Americans spend $12 billion to buy or rent video tapes, compared to just $4.9 billion on box office ticket sales. 76% of households have VCR players.

1994 - Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen form the film studio DreamWorks.

Late 1990’s - Another cinematic evolution began, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile DVDs became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.

2000 - The documentary film began to escalate as a commercial genre for conceivably the first time, with the success of films such as March of the Penguins and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.

2001 - Saw the beginning of a growing problem of digital distribution to be overcome with regards to expiration of copyrights, content security, and enforcing copyright. There is higher compression for films, and Moore’s law allows for increasingly cheaper technology.

2002 - More films began being released simultaneously to IMAX cinema, the first was Disney animation Treasure Planet.

2003 - The Matrix Revolutions and a re-release of The Matrix Reloaded could be viewed in IMAX cinemas.

2005 - The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to have been at least partially shot in IMAX technology.

2009 - James Cameron’s 3D film Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time.

2010 onward - 3D films gained increasing popularity with many other films being released in 3D. The best critical and financial success was the feature film animation of Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar’s Toy Story 3.

2012 - Titanic was re-released in a special 3D version to celebrate the 100th anniversary.



Short Film - Poster Research

          

 Today I began creating my poster for The Spider and the Fly. I researched different posters for different genres and found a selection that appealed to me and matched the tone of my film. I found Hollywood Blockbuster posters too dramatic, but minimal indie posters were exactly what I wanted. The character/s as the main focus and the title easily seen.

I chose this image for my poster:

Closer to the premiere I will be posting the final product.