Media Evaluation - part 1

Part 1 - The brief.

What brief were you are working to…

The brief in which we were working to was to produce title sequence and opening of a new film. Our film is also in line with Todorov's theory as the order of the film is beginning, middle and end.

Explain the title and what happens in your opening sequence making reference to the treatment…

Our film in which we created is called, 'Walking with the Dead’; we decided to use this name so that the audience would be able to see that the film could be a horror/thriller, just by the connotation of the title. The title also connotes the idea of the film being something to do with a dead person. This links to the main storyline of a small boy who is being followed by a spirit of his own unborn brother. The dead brother then controls the young boy and takes over child, making him change personality and become a different child, causing pain to others. His young brother died in a car crash when his mother was pregnant, all of the family members died however, Harry survived. Harry always blamed his sister as they were in the car driving to pick her up that day from a party. Grace (the sister) was left to look after Harry; the unborn brother begins to hurt Grace in both mental and physical ways through Harry.

Explain the sub genre…

The sub-genre of our film is paranormal, making it more of a paranormal thriller. The film also contains psychological aspects, which are shown in the form of a documentary allowing the audience to follow the child and his changes throughout the film.

Media Evaluation - Part 2

Part 2 - Who would be the audience for your product?

Who are the target audience - habits/lifestyle/media consumption (not just/age/gender/skin colour)…

For our film, we decided to aim our thriller based film towards young adults ages 16-24. We felt that as the girl who was being hurt; physically and mentally by her younger brother, Harry in the film, it had to be the certain age of the people we are aiming for in our target audience. We decided to make the sister, Grace around 18 years old so that the target audience could relate, which could make them more scared of the actions in which are happening in the film, meaning this could create more suspense for the audience. The target audience lifestyle would be based for a typical young adult living in Britain, as it is a British based thriller film. The environment in which we have targeted is mainly people living in an urban area, based around the middle class society. There isn’t a gender target to this film as we feel that the gender difference as we feel it would interest both men and women.

What pre- production research did you conduct with them…

For our pre-production research to the target audience in which we chose, the group decided to create some questionnaires that we could give to this age group. From the results, we were able to see what interests and fears that the audience ranges seemed to have, which then gave ideas with what fears we could add to our storyline for the film. We also had a class crit that helped our research as all the people in the class had the age range of the target audience. From this we then thought of the idea of something being psychology and unable to see as this seemed to alarm a lot of the people included in the target audience.

Media Evaluation - Part 3

Part 3 - What kind of media institution might disribute your media product and why?

Use real examples of companies…

The media institution that we thought would be best suited for our film would be ‘Universal’, as when we had researched many possible distributers, we felt that Universal had distributed many films that had a genre of thriller or horror. Examples of these were: The Strangers, Slither and Children of men, which had a main genre of thriller, that we wanted to base our film on. However, we also researched '20th Century Fox' as a distributer but we felt our genre and target audience linked in with 'Universal'.

Use examples of films with the same genre/ same audience and films they have distributed…

This then related to the target audience being very similar for Universal as the films in which they distributed were young adult based such as: White Noise and The Mummy.