Evaluation of my opening sequence 'The Drop' Question 5

Q5: how did you attract/address your audience?



After analysing films like Adulthood and Shank , we decided before filming that we would use a young teenage cast . This helped attract and address our audience because with a young cast , our audience will be able to relate and possibly identify themselves with the characters, which would then intrigue and therefore attract them to watch our media product. from our audience research we know that our target audience are interested in a lot of action in-between scenes , we endeavoured to provide them with this by adding a chase scene that we filmed and added at the end of our opening scene. The clothes that we made the main male character wear helps to portrays him as urban which addresses to our audience because we target urban students. The use of props, in this case , what type of clothes the character is wearing to address a target audience has been used in the clip below from Adulthood:

Evaluation of my opening sequence 'The Drop' Question 4

Q4: Who would be the audience for your media product?


The target audience for our media product is both male and female students ages 13 to 19 in the UK who have an interest in thrillers. This is our target audience because we thought that the concept of our media product would only appeal to teenagers, and after showing our opening sequence to a group of adults we found out that this was true. Comparing our media product with another British film like Adulthood we then realised that due to both our films having mainly an urban cast adults won't be interested in the concept because they can't relate, therefore that's the reason why our target audience is both male and female students ages 13 to 19 in the UK who have an interest in thrillers.

Evaluation of my opening scene 'The Drop' Question 3

Q3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why ?

Having researched British film production companies and distributors, we feel that companies that specialise in and have successfully produced and distributed low budget British thrillers are the companies most likely to distribute our film . Due to the fact that our media product is low budget ,  a media institution like Vertigo Films might show interest  in distributing our film because Vertigo Films has a history in supporting low budget films like London to Brighton and Bronson.

Evaluation of my opening sequence 'The Drop' Question 2

Q2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My media product represents men in there mid 20's as powerful and mysterious and even though there is no dialogue being used, this is shown by a variety of low angle shots and the fact that John Smith's face is concealed until it is finally revealed in a couple of the last shots at the end.




The use of the props ,which in this case is the black suit ,
also helps to show how John Smith's character is powerful because people who wear suits tend to be of high status. The use of suits to portray a character as powerful and mysterious has been used in various films, for example in Collateral Tom Cruise's is wearing black glasses and a grey suit which adds on to the mystery of his character, this is shown in the scene below:

The young character of Samuel (The young male protagonist) is represented as passive , this is shown by a variety of tracking shots , along with the use of props which is his black jacket and bright grey jeans. Showing Samuel's character as passive is unconventional since so many other products have shown the social group known as teenagers as aggressive and irresponsible, an example of this is the show skins.

Evaluation of my opening sequence 'The Drop' Question 1

Q1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our opening sequence uses conventions common to many thrillers, for example when we edited the short chase scene that we filmed in London ,we intentionally made quick cuts and camera angle changes because after analysing many thrillers, we realised that they tend to use quick cuts to create a lot of suspense and anticipation along with different camera angle changes to increase the pace and intensity of the scene.Our opening scene also uses the thriller convention of lighting because we filmed during the early morning to make it seem like the main character is calm and safe therefore surprising the audience when the plot takes a turn of event.
The use of this editing technique has been used in the following thriller films (and many more) :

INCEPTION                                                   BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT 


              

We decided to use the thriller conventions that are mentioned above because we agreed that by using these conventions the audience would recognize them and therefore making it easier for them to identify the genre of our opening sequence. We also used another thriller convention which is the use of sound , in our research we realised that thrillers tend to use atmospheric music as a way of building to a climax, this is shown in the opening scene of The Dark Knight.

So yet again in order to make it easier for the audience to identify that our opening sequence is a thriller , we  used the convention of using climactic music throughout, especially during our chasing scene. Our media product does not contain any dialogue,  which can be seen as challenging thriller conventions mainly because during my research I have observed, that thrillers tend to have dialogue that keeps the audience captivated and interested in what is happening in a scene. So with our opening sequence we had to rely a lot on the music to build suspense which could be seen us unconventional for a thriller because thrillers tend to have more then just music , which in this case is captivating dialogue. 

Our opening sequence 'The Drop'