evaluation question

1. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
During production planning our group decided we wanted to target teenagers aged
15 up to young adults who recently left school. We decided to choose this specific
audience because they can relate to the story line and it then becomes a personal
experience for the viewer. Our group are all still in school, which enables us to have
easy access, a good idea of places to film and the means to turn an area into what
we need for our film.
When considering how to advertise our product we had the idea of having the trailer
shown at the start of ‘Paranormal Activity 4’ as this film is a franchise of low budget
films. It is also filmed at an average suburban house, which is how they have related
and made the film more personal to its audience and this is the same strategy we
have decided to use so we thought it was very fitting to show our trailer at this
specific time. As many horror films released now have some sort of teen horror
aspect we decided to take it to the next level by making it more personal by filing it in
a school
During the production planning we had to consider actors and characters. WE
decided on a story line, in which students have been reported missing and found
murdered. This attracts a student to investigate and is tormented during his
investigations by a thing, which we called ‘Entity’.
We decided to use two members of our group to be the actors as it seemed
appropriate as they are both students at the school and fit the social group. It also
enabled us to have control over our class time and know when they were free to film.
The ‘Entity’ is played by Luke and the student investigator is played by Danny. The
reason we decided to use Luke as the ‘Entity’ is that he is short, so when you see
him during the film he looks scary but harmless as the size difference between Luke
and Danny is large. The shock factor on how powerful and scary he really is made
larger when you see the damage he can cause.
In a lot of horror films you get a ‘Final girl’ as they are portrayed weak and helpless,
which is very stereotypical and not a true representation of women. Examples of this
are ‘Scream 1, 2, 3, 4’ and ‘Freddy vs. Jason’ and ‘The Ring’. To turn the stereotype
around we chose to use a male character that becomes weak and helpless to show
a true representation of what someone of that age and gender may do in the
situation. This then backs up the way we are trying to make this film as personal as
we can.