Sunday, 13 December 2015

Question 4&5





Our media product is a horror movie that is filled with suspense, which generally appeals to the teenage age bracket of 13-17 years old. The fact we had characters that were around the same age as they are more likely to watch it than other age groups. For example, Maya is 17 years old so the age target market of 13-17 years old would be able to relate to her more so if she does something a bit odd they wouldn't think about why she's doing that or why's she going towards a door when something bad happened. This links to the Uses and Gratifications Model as we want the audience to be entertained and intrigued by our horror movie rather than encouraging them to act in a certain way.

Most Hollywood mainstream horror movies such as the Silent Hill Series and Insidious have a significantly large amount of White acting roles but our horror- thriller opening sequence subverts this norm by having an all-ethnic minority acting roles. So, our horror-thriller sequence wouldn't be able to attract the people who watch these mainstream movies based on the traditional values Hollywood movies behold but we will have more saturated ethnic minority audience as they will be drawn to Maya's culture and race. 


As a group, we weren't sure what specific gender would want to watch our thriller piece. So we conducted a questionnaire to give us a insight of whether or not a male or female would want to watch our thriller piece opening. There was a clear division between both genders thus it allowed us to make our thriller piece more uni-sex. But there is a large amount of female roles in our thriller piece opening so it would attract more females than males. We have a male 'unknown' character so it would appeal to men a bit more as they would wonder who the Anonymous character is and how did he know about the cup falling on the floor. So, our thriller opening sequence would have an uni-sex audience.











Everything that was used to make the product was used for a specific individual purpose. Technological convergence to the setting was to ensure we can make our product more believable and to appeal to the audience. The specific class that would be attracted by out thriller opening sequence would be Middle class as Maya's life is relatable to their own through the items she beholds and the way she acts in the opening sequence.

This video below roughly describes what we want our audience to be:



Firstly, we conducted a questionnaire and the majority of people who completed the questionnaire are within the age bracket 15-19 years old thus making it our target audience. This data was put in Slide share, which helped me understand what the audience would like in a movie by asking questions like 'Which thriller sub-genres most appeals to you?' and 'What's your favourite thriller movie?' helped me come to the conclusion that our thriller opening sequence sub-genre should be Horror as it appeals to our audience a lot.


We also showed our thriller opening sequence to our focus group that were part of our target audience age bracket. This gave us a better understanding on what we should do to improve our thriller piece to attract the audience more. One comment from the students if Maya had a 'guilty conscience' and that could be the reason why her life is crumpling down. We took this comment into practice but indirectly. For example, we presented Maya as a stereotype of a typical Blonde- she cares about her looks a lot and she likes to gossip. The cup connotes that her life is starting to crumple then immediately a text comes saying 'Aren't you going to pick that up' when she decides to leave it. So, this comment helped us to appeal to our target audience more from the feedback of our target audience age bracket. 


So we researched lots of movies that are related to our movie sub-genre, such as the movie ‘Saw’ and the ‘Conjuring’. These movies have the same sinister connotation that we incorporated in our thriller opening sequence. I noticed how these movies have diegetic sound that builds up then stops but reaches grabs your attention when something weird happens at the end of the film. So, we incorporated both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds so our thriller opening sequence can work more effectively if it only had non-diegetic sounds. For example, Mary was washing her hands (the water flowing out of the tap is the diegetic sound) then a hand appears, which was put a smacking sound effect to emphasise the eeriness of the situation when the hand appears out of nowhere.


Anonymous' plot itself grips the audience's attention. One feedback we got back states: "We have a nice storyline that fits the typical Hollywood movies", which inevitably makes the audience want to watch something familiar to them. Also, the ending of our thriller opening sequence is a smacking hand, which makes the audience wonder whose hand it is and why is it there. This grabs the audience's attention as it leaves the audience in suspense so they would think about the movie afterwards and make predictions of what will happen to Mary.






In conclusion, we decided who will be our target audience based on the factors that were held in our questionnaire as well as the focus group. We chose our target audience to be the age bracket of 15- 19 year old as they held a significant majority in our questionnaire and the feedbacks given back from our focus group helped illustrate the flaws and pros of our thriller piece. This helped us attract and address our target audience further by the official title of our thriller piece sequence, the actresses that play a role in the film and all the equipment(props, costumes, technological devices) used to make the movie itself. The plot of the movie itself may be confusing for people under 15 so that make our choice of target audience more accurate. 

Question 3


Friday, 4 December 2015

Filming day 3

For our group to prevent issues from happening against, we experimentated with different shots for every single scene. For example, the scene where Maryam receives a text that says ' Aren't you going to pick that up' had several shots,which consisted of the Over the Shoulder Shot, Extreme Close-Up, Point of View shot, which enables us to have various amounts of shots so it will help us edit quickly and throughouly.