Evaluation - Question 4 - Luke

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In our film we used specific social groups or type of people to try and stay with the audience’s dominant ideology, to do this we chose to use a woman as many people in society believe women are more vulnerable than men. The actor is also small so this enhances the vulnerability of the character.

We put loads of writing over the female actors arm to make her look as if she is going crazy and we based this look on our image from the film 23.




We also thought if we use a teenage girl we would attract a wider audience and attract our target audience of 15-18 year olds as they would possibly be able to relate to the victim and be more attached to the film itself.



Coming away from the actor’s appearance but now onto where they are for example at the start of the film she starts of in a very pink bedroom (a typical girl’s bedroom) which represents also a teenage girl. The actual house itself represents a specific social background (middle class).

In the film itselfs we used lots of close ups on the girl actor as we believed this would make the girl seem weaker and frightened, also it built tension for the audience.











We have also used two girls as our threat also to challenge both dominant and recessive ideology by using female empowerment hence the two girls.

Another film that follows the same sort of ideologies as us is 'scream'

Here’s a clip to show the vulnerability of the girl.

This is the trailer of the film 'scream' this emphasizes the dominant ideology of society, women are more vulnerable.

These two screen shots are from the trailer above, they show how the women is represented as weak and helpless, in the first the shot it shows how the women is scared and shocked, whilst in the second shot is shows weakness and the women being over powered by the masked person.




We tried to get the same emotion in the first shot in our film to show the female actor being scared hence making her look weak. Heres a shot to show this.

The person who answered our questionnaire was within our targeted age group, the person is a female and she is 17 years old so this is the type of person we really want to reach.

The person said that the canted angles we used give an interesting effect, this is the look we went for, we tried to attract the audience a bit by making everything seem abnormal to show that the character is confused and keep the audience interested.

In the journey of making the character seem confused we may have lost our audience with it s the person said the narrative was slightly confusing.

She said we represented the gender (girl) in a negative way, we did intentionally do this because we knew that the dominant ideology of society is that the female is more vulnerable hence it may attract a wider audience, we also did challenge this idea as we used females as a threat also.

Review of unfinished movie

Some of the things that we need to improve in our film is we need more close ups, also the outside scenes need re-shooting due to the lighting of the shots and that it doesn't really flow well together. Some scenes such as the one were the door slams behind the girl and she turns around, we may need to re-shoot that as the reaction on the girls face was not really sufficient and she did not look scared.

However we liked many aspects of our film such as how the scenes flow well together at the start of the film, we have some really good shots like when she was coming down the stairs and we got a nice shadow effect, and when the door slams behind her before her reaction looked pretty good and creepy.

Evaluation Question 3 Dale - Who would be the audience for your media product?

Paranormal activity ratings. This shows that the majority of the votes come from people aged between 18 - 29 but received high votes from males aged 18 and younger.

This image from the film '23' gave us the idea to put symbols on the victim.

This is a shot from the film '23'.

This image is from stigmata which we watched for inspiration for some of our scenes in out film.

Following the trend of most psychological horrors we decided to make our film a 15. We believe this is correct as our film doesnt contain any gore or bad language which would cause the rating to go up. It also couldn't be any lower as some of the scenes could disturb younger viewers. The film is aimed mainly towards both males and females of age 15 and above as these vote similar films more highly showing that this age group enjoy the films more than the older population. This is because other psychological films (such as Paranormal Activity) receive similarly high votes from both sexes (see above).  We feel that this is the typical age for people who watch horror films as they like to experience the thrill and excitement of being scared. From this we will make aerie music and many moments which could cause the audience to jump to try and terrify the audience and succeeding in making the film like a horror is. We got a form in which we got someone to fill in and put their dislikes and likes about our film. One of the likes in which they stated was that they liked the soundtrack which was creepy. The bit that the audience especially liked was the whispering chanting. The audience also agreed with our age group that we aimed the film towards despite not actually telling them what age group it was aimed at. We targeted the audience by finding information on imdb.com which helped us judge our target audience for the film.