The film Red Mountain represents several social groups through its opening sequence. It appeals to both male and female audiences through its thriller/film noir storyline. It represents different ages by showing the struggles faced by its middle-aged main character detective. It depicts the detective as middle class through his profession, clothing, and home. Although featuring only male characters, it shows different emotions to avoid portraying gender as dominant. The film aims to attract a male audience who enjoy intelligent mystery plots, while still appealing to a wide range through its 15 rating.

1. How does the film Red Mountain
represent particular social groups?
Michael Hutchinson

2. Red Mountain
• When creating our opening
sequence we held regular
group meetings to ensure
that our film will reach its
maximum potential and
appeal to a range of different
ages and audiences.
• By doing this we had to
ensure that our storyline was
appealing to both a female
and male audience and
hitting our genre of a
Thriller/Film Noir.

3. Age
• Firstly we represented age in a very stimulating way in our opening sequence as we incorporated a
range of emotions into our sequence as you are given an insight into the persona of our main
character ‘Detective Kinsbrook’ in which you are taken on a journey into his life and the problems
people can face in their life.
• Through the emotions of ‘Detective Kinsbrook’ the audience can see how passionate he was
towards his job and that he has obviously been working in his profession for a number of years
which eventually leads to his downfall.
• To fit the conventions of Film Noir we dressed our main character in very formal attire to show how
he is a proud man and takes his mistakes into his stride. We feel that some of our audience can
relate to our main character as they might have faced struggles in their life and had to face them
alone. We opted for a middle aged man when casting for the part of ‘Detective Kinsbrook’ as we
felt it is the appropriate age for our character to appeal to a larger target audience. During a group
meeting it was suggested that we needed to cast a character which had both good looks and
charisma in order to appeal to a larger female audience.
• Furthermore we added a series of ‘Red herring’s’ in our sequence to keep the audience
intrigued, interested and ‘hooked’ to our film. This also allowed us to appeal to a male
audience, we know this because when we conducted our audience research we found that men
enjoy action and thriller the most whereas woman enjoy mainly thrillers and drama.
• Finally by including ski footage we realised how we could also capture a younger generation of
viewers. We know this because skiing is predominantly a younger aged person sport, we know this
because not only are we skiing enthusiasts but after extensive research we have found that it is
skiing is very hard going and is very hard on your legs and knee’s and knee injuries are most
common.

4. Class
• Although we put a modern spin on our film noir opening sequence we researching
into our main characters profession. As a detective our main character is blue
collar middle class, the reason for this is that his job involves a lot of manual
labour. In the 21st Centaury middle class is a class in which works are paid an
adequate amount of money and are deemed ‘well off’. This can also be seen
through the detectives clothing which is a very slim fitting and seems new
suggesting he has only recently bought that item of clothing. He is well shaven and
athletic, which is suitable for his occupation.
• Although we did not incorporate any establishing shots of the detectives
household by the footage used in our opening sequence you can see that his
house is stylish and time, money and effort have been spent to make his house
look nice and attractive. In the background of one of our shots a treadmill can be
seen showing his athletic background.
• Additionally the ski footage that we filmed and incorporated into our opening
sequence shows the main characters middle class status as after research we came
to a conclusion that lower class people do not go skiing as a hobby and if they
were to embark of a skiing holiday it would be seen as a luxury or once in a life
time opportunity whereas others might see it as a hobby.

5. Gender
• Although all of our characters in our film are
male we feel that the male gender is not
dominant. The reason for this is that
throughout the opening sequence the male
character portrays many different emotions to
the audience.
• In the picture shown to the right you can see
how the main character is very emotional over
the fact he has been put into a wheelchair and
is now wheelchair bound for the rest of his life.
We also feel that gender is represented through
the use of sound at the end of the sequence in
which the director has used an ambiguous
effect as the audience are unsure if the main
character killed himself or was killed by
someone else misleading the audience.

6. Target Audience
• Although we feel that we appeal to a range of different target audiences we feel
that we are specifically going to aim our film at a male audience as we feel that we
cater more towards a male audience by including extreme sports, guns and an
action filled plot. Also after conducting our audience research we came to the
conclusion that the male audience are more interested in films with intelligent and
mysterious plots with a sinister edge than the other age groups we looked into.
• Originally we wanted our film to be strictly in the Film Noir genre with a modern
edge, but as filming began and more group meetings were held we decided as a
group to incorporate the thriller genre as well making our film a Film Noir/Thriller.
• The film rating we decided to give to our film was a 15 as the film looks at some
emotional issues adults face in life and feel that this would be unsuitable for a
young teenage audience and our film has references to death throughout.
• By using the film rating of 15 we realised that we have more freedom in what we
can show in our film and although we do not have any violence in our sequence
we reference this in the rest of our film. We feel through a 15 rated film we can
attract a larger audience than making our film an 18 as that is restricting our
audience as the Government states that the legal definition of entering adulthood
is between the ages of 16-21. This indicated to us that by setting a 15 for our film
shows that we will still attract a mature audience although some of our audience
will still be teenagers.