Case Study: Panic Attack

I have looked into the short film called 'Panic Attack' to see what makes a short film succsseful in terms of how it is distrubuted to the public.

Back in November 2009, advertising director Frederico Alvarez produced Panic Attack. The narrative of the film was a robot attack in Montevideo with the genre of Action.

The overall cost of the film was $300, most of the budget going towards the extras as he needed a large amount of people in order for it to be effective. The visual and sound effects were added alter in post-production also by Alvarez.



Alvarez posted the film online on a visual effects blog and within a few days of it going online, a became very succsseful due to its popularity. By releasing it online, it caught the eye of Kayne West who acted as an opinion leaer and tweeted about the short film to his followers. This is the two step flow theory where it consists of the fact that the public form their opinions under the influence of opinion leaders through mass media, and in this case, through the use of social media. For Alvarez, his distribution method proved to be successful, leading to more profit. This could be partly becuase of the popularity of social media- word can get around easier. The film was also distrubuted to Youtube.

After a few days, Alvarez recieved calls from Hollywood to direct films. In less than two weeks, Alvarez travelled to LA with his new agent. A contract was set up with Mandate Pictures and Spider-Man director Sam Raimi to create a $30 million feature film. The film was set to be about an alien-invasion in Buenos Aires which was due to be released in the coming year.

Evaluation
I have found that distributing my short film online can be qutie successful as a lot fo the social media platforms link which can lead to wide media coverage. Therefore, I will be distributing the film online on platfroms such as Youtube. I will also be creating a promotional package to help during the distribution process.