Monday, 28 April 2014

Question 4 Who would be the audience for your media product?

What was the target audience for your film and why? 
For our film we wanted to aim it at a unisex audience ages around 15-30 year olds. The age rating is around 15 because we wanted our target audience to relate to the characters such as Roxanne who is quite young and so is the other female character. Basically we wanted our audience to have a good understanding of our characters and what they represent. Additionally we felt that this was appropriate due to frequent drug references and the bad language used such as swear words throughout the film.
 


What age rating did you decide to give your film and why? 
After finding and writing up our story line we decided to give our film an age rating of 15 we decided this because after looking at BBFC we got a better understanding of age ratings and what they should contain within the film. We found that an age 15 film should contain sexual references, drugs and strong language. However we included two but didn't have time to include sexual references due to it being only a two minute film if we carried on we would have definitely included this into the film.

What research did you conduct with your target audience? 
Well before doing the film we looked at crime dramas and what they often included such as iconography and characterisation. We conducted an online survey to prove this and to see what our target audience would like to see within a crime based film. By doing this we got a clear understanding of what our target audience would like to see and what would be the best things to include within our film 'Jackpot'.

How did you use this research for your film? 
When we got our research back from the random sample we got it from we got lots of feedback that will be good in indicating a target audience for our film. For example when we got our surveys back we found that more people wanted to know a bit of a back story about our protagonist Roxanne as they wanted a character they could relate to and understand better. I think we achieved this by the use of camera angles and the scene where she surprisingly takes out the drugs of her bag. The use of the gunshot sound effect makes the audience sympathise with her and to some extent feel sorry for her being burdened with this. Then the use of Martin Crowe the villain in the story line and the use of his broken speech supports the impression of his shady secretive personality. We chose to do this purposely and make his dialogue seem suspicious and not very well pronounced as he's thinking of what to say all the name thus displaying nervousness.

Monday, 7 April 2014

Preliminary Exercise


Question 2 How does your media product represent particular social groups?


How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Stereotypes and Ideology within a film are very important mainly because the audience can then relate to a character or at least know a little bit about them just by looking at them.


Social groups:

Sexuality

Regional identity

Gender

Socio-Economic class

Age

Disability/ability

 Race/Ethnicity


Sexuality within our film isn’t really an immediate issue and isn’t mentioned or hinted anywhere.


Regional identity is recognized in Jackpot mainly because of the accents used and ‘Barnsley’ is mentioned within the script. Urban areas such as a park where we filmed are associated with teenagers and crime is sought to happen there a lot. To represent the North of England and mainly south Yorkshire in a positive light we would have included no drugs, good education and clean areas. However we do not show our area in a positive light but rather in a negative light and instead involve drugs and crime into our narrative.


Gender in our narrative is a key subject because we have a male role and two female roles. In our film we see women in a positive light acting innocent and as a victim of the male. On the other hand we see the male as a villain planting the drugs in the females bag. This doesn’t challenge the stereotype of gender as most crime dramas have the male as a villain and a woman as the victim. To add to gender roles we have a female friend of the main character who also is a woman this is typical because most friends are usually of the same sex.


Socio-Economic class is included in our narrative due to Daniel being a drug dealer in the film disguised as a lawyer. This could suggest he has a lot of money and is of higher class than Olivia who is a college student. He is also dressed in a suit making him look like he is a businessman. The friend of Olivia is portrayed just as a typical teenager and is from the same class as Olivia.


Age is a big factor within our film; Daniel is playing a male 30+ year old who appears to be mature as he is a lawyer what you’d expect from him. Two teenage girls are also used in our film hence the reason why their so naive towards the drugs when there found. Age defines most of our script. In the film Daniel because he is older talks very proper and formative while the two girls talk very broad and use a lot of slang this could be associated with their ages.


Disability and ability is not an issue in our film and isn’t part of our script but it may be included later on in our film if we had carried on.


Race and ethnicity wasn’t really explored in our film either all the characters are white British but this wasn’t done for any purpose it just happened that we were all from the same ethnic group.