For my final junior year project at Freestyle Academy, students are required to explore each of our given passions and relate it to our major at freestyle. For my project, I decided to explore one of my deepest passions which are economics, and relate it to my major by exploring the economics of film.

Basic Overview(Infographic)

When starting off my project I came up with the two most essential film economics questions in order to get a basic overview of the topic before diving deeper into it. 1) What is the general economical market trend for films? and 2) Is the film industry economically moral when offering jobs?. When doing my research I couldn’t find a straightforward answer to these questions, after scrolling from website to website I was stuck in the mud and had no idea where to go, so I decided that I was going to do what any economist should too and look at widely produced numbers to get my answers. The numbers I looked at were fairly simple to analyze but hard to find. When looking at the general trend of films there were so many numbers to look at but ultimately I decided to look at the best from the film industry. I analyzed the amount of money the highest-grossing blockbuster made per year and compared those numbers from 2005-2019 and what I found was a general upward trend in gross earnings as you can see the upwards trended bar chart. For the second question I looked at a common indicator of given industries economical and job morals; the percentage of women working in the industry and what I found was a slight increase in the percentage of women from 2008-2019 however it wasn’t substantial. All of these points of data can be found in graphs that I made which can be found on my infographic.

Process/Product

For my final explorations project, I decided to code the ultimate film economics spreadsheet. I started this process by analyzing 99 jobs in the film industry from directors to camera operators and looked at how much they made for a film that had a budget of 200 million dollars. I then took those numbers and calculated the percent of the budget the given person was paid in order to code the ultimate film economists spreadsheet.

The next part of coding the spreadsheet was answering two of the most asked film economics questions. The First of which is how much am I going to make on a film set. Let’s say that freestyle staff gives you a substantial loan of 1000 dollars to make a film, and you had your staff ask you how much am I going to make? This spreadsheet answers all of those questions by taking the percent of budget earned that I found when analyzing the 200 million dollar film and multiplying it by the budget you can then find how much any of 99 jobs analyzed can make. For example, you as the director of this film would make a hefty 20 dollars.

The final question my spreadsheet answers is how much does my budget has to be to become a millionaire(or any desirable “x” value). This spreadsheet answers that by taking the desired million dollars and dividing it by the given percent you will get the total budget. Examples of using this function of the spreadsheet can be shown bellow.

Reflection

The explorations project was a great learning experience that taught me some of the ins and outs of economics. It gave me some base information on how to economically analyze any industry both on a quantitative and qualitative level. This will hopefully help me when I plan to study economics in college and give me a base layer into combining various interests of mine.