1. HOW DOES MY MEDIA PRODUCT REPRESENT DIFFERENT SOCIAL GROUPS?

2. How did we know what to include? Audience research was a critical factor in deciding what to include in our thriller. Because the audience wanted a male protagonist, we casted Paul to play him. The audience also wanted a male antagonist, but we wanted to put a twist on her character and not disappoint the audience, so we made it hard to tell what gender the antagonist actually was, so we casted Elisha as the villain, but overdressed her in a theatre coat, mask and heavy boots to disguise most of her feminine aspects. The audience also wanted to experience anticipation whilst watching the thriller, so we left the intro on a cliff-hanger to get the audience asking “What will happen to the man we saw? What does the killer want with him?” This creates a feeling of suspense and excitement. Also, we decided because the audience wanted the thriller to be set in the present day, we would use a modern, average jobs such as a businessman to represent everyday life, because offices and such seem to be being built everywhere nowadays. The audience wanted our antagonist to be an assassin, and we created that to an extent – the antagonist silently goes round, killing people whilst Martin Hallwood follows the trail – to an extent, she would be assassinating those people so we feel we fufilled the audience request. A full section on audience research can be found in section 4 of my blog.

3. Representations Our protagonist, played by Paul Johnson, will represent a successful working man. This aligns with the aspirations of civilians – promoted, in a position of power. He will also represent a class which we might not entirely understand – mentally ill. Nobody really understands what is going on inside a persons head, but we will try to break that line of thinking with insight into his mind throughout the film. He also represents what it would like to be a high ranking businessman, the stresses it might come with. Women often come along into the supporting protagonist role for the main character, and not really as the villain. Our antagonist, played by Elisha Brookhouse, will represent the darker side of human nature, as she is a troubled girl who decides to take matters into her own hands. This could represent a troubled human mind, and how far people are willing to go if driven hard enough.

4. Representation Of Male/Female In our thriller opening, there are two characters – the killer, who was female, and the protagonist, who was male. The male character was dressed in a smart buis- ness suit – a classic representation of the working man. This is what we were going for because the protagonist is a normal civilian who gets thrown into an unfortunate situation. The female character, the killer, is displayed a little differently. We wanted heavy concealment, this meant we didn’t want people to be able to tell what gender the antagonist was. We achieved this through use of the theatre mask, the theatre cloak and the heavy steel toe-cap boots – we were trying to hide all the obvious feminine details of the actor.We think we did this well, because not many people we showed the video to were able to tell whether the killer was male or female when they watched it.

5. Planned Messages/Communication The message we attempted to communicate was a message of health – stress can kill. Martin Hallwood is a stressed businessman, and in the first stages after his promotion he got extremely violent towards his wife, Rosie, and turns to medication which we can see he is dependent on throughout the film (Refer to treatment) . Our main message would be try to get help before you take your problems out on other people – you can destroy relationships and break friendships as martin did. Also, get help before you turn to prescription drugs to help you with your problems – they’re not always a good thing. About certain social groups, our film is quite stereotypical: The working man is stressed, and whilst not entirely reliant on prescription drugs , they do tend to have little time for family because of all their work. Because some of the victims are elderly, this shows that the older generation are quite fragile and vulnerable.