Shane Meadows Production Practices

Shane Meadows is a english film director and work for Warp Films he is 36 years old and has produced such films as Room for Romeos Brass, Twenty Four Seven, Dead Man's Shoes and This is England. He usually makes low budget films that are targeted at a small audience most of his films are very socially realistic and have a heavy realince on recommendation if they are going to make money. This is because unlike big blockbuster films, Warp Films does not have much money to advertise and produce top of the range movies and movie trailers so most of the advertisement done for there films is by us (the public) through recomendation.

Meadow's theory is that if he has a smaller budget he will therefore have a smaller loss if the film does not 'make it', so meadows does everything he can to keep the budget down. He uses unknown or little known actors in his films. This is because they will have smaller wages than the A-list actors in big films and they will help keep the social realism he is usally looking to produce. He normally uses natural lighting instead of adding it via editing or buying lights, he spends as little as possible on props and actors/actresses costumes, he will buy things instead of renting them e.g. cars, props, costumes e.t.c. (this is because the price of renting for a 6 month plus filming period could massively over exceed the cost of buying the product they are renting). One of the main budget savours however is using pre-made/fabricated sets, however this can mean alot of hard work and time being consumed whilst trying to find a place that already looks like the set for the film he is producing. He also uses recycled clips and audio e.g. in This is England the start of the films is a compilation of old clips from tv in the 80's, and he also uses audio from the radio in the 80's and simply edits it in to his film.

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

The budget of a film institution affetcs the production practices because it limits the amount of things they can do to attract and appeal to an audience. For example they cannot use special effects and CGI within the movie which might appeal to a wider audience as the film will look more professional but some might argue this could make it lose it's realism. Also it means they cannot afford to use big stars/actors which might attract other audience members because they lked these actors in other films. A low budget means that the director(s) and producer(s) cannot use lighting in a special way to represent certain things in characters e.g. spotlight on a character to make sure the audience is paying attention to them, instead they have to use natural lighting and if they have scripted some scenes in a certain weather they will simply have to hope that this weather comes natural because they won't be able to generate it themselves. Also larger budgets means you can pay for things like extras e.t.c so the film looks more realistic e.g. extras in a shop buying things t make the shop look busy whilst in 'This is England' in many of the scenes the only actors are the main actors this means the director is forced to set the scene in a quiter surrounding and therefore could not produce a film in a busy city because they couldn't afford the money for all the extras.