In my foundation portfolio I constructed a thriller opening called 'One Step Ahead' my film opening was a hybrid that was classified within the man on the run /political/ action sub-genres . When constructing my media product I had to consider my film opening in relation to the concept of audience .
First of all I had to consider who would be my target audience and what rating my film opening would be classified as . To help with the discovery ,I looked at movies that were classified within my chosen sub-genres . One of the films that we looked at was The Bourne Identity we used IMDB to help find out what type of audience the movie attracted . We discovered that the film mainly attracted Caucasian males aged 15 and upwards . 2/3 of the Bourne trilogies are rated as a 12A we decide to have the same rating as we wanted to attract / target a mass audience and giving our film a 12A rating would broaden the audience that we would attract . we then used BBFC to help ensure that we adhered to the guidelines that were already set .However we wanted to attract a larger female audience to do this we chose to include a female protagonist within our film opening .To make sure that our idea was successful we conducted interviews on females age 15 and upwards from our interviews we discovered that this idea was successful as most of them would desire to see more females in empowering roles within movies within our genre.
There are many ways in which our completed thriller opening could impact the audience . the audience could decode certain messages within our opening and receive different readings of our media product . Stuart hall suggests three different ways in which the audience could decode certain media products a proffered reading, a negotiated reading and a op-positional reading . As we had a female protagonist the audience could see that we are empowering her character and going against the traditional conventions of an action thriller . Furthermore as she is of British and African descent it could be said that her character is going against the ways that most black females are portrayed within films the mid-shots that reveal her character are not provocative and do not encourage the male gaze . It is evident that her character is significant as she is seen via flashback giving vital information to the male protagonist . however some may have an op-positional reading of our product the opposed audience could recognize that we have a female protagonist but may not be satisfied with her position someone who is a feminist may feel that her character serves the purpose of a sidekick to the male protagonist and that her character is not really challenging the stereotypical representations of a female character/protagonist within the genre .
When making our thriller opening we had to understand that our film would meet and maybe cater to the needs of a mass audience .Blumer and Katz refer to this as the uses and gratification theory. People or audiences would come to see our film if they are seeking a thrill or for a sense of escapism ,escape from reality and their everyday lives as our film opens the door to another reality. the dark and mysterious lighting that we have used sets the mood an contributes to the tension and suspense this is further emphasized by the slow panning at the start of the film opening . as the opening begins to progress the editing and the soundtrack follows; the fast pace editing and the the crescendo soundtrack helps contribute to the tension and suspense built within all of these techniques that we used help contribute to the thrill that the audience may seek when watching our film .Rarely audience members would seek to watch a film by themselves but would usually go for social interaction some would discuss the film with their friends others for a sense of enjoyment and to socialize .
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