My Q5

How did you attract and address your audience?

Our primary target audience is teenagers. I think we would rate the film a 15 and aim it at teenagers but I think we have also been successful in targeting slightly older people in their 20`s to 30`s,the father Ilya for example is middle aged/mature and I think this helps in attracting slightly older people as well as teenagers because they are able to relate to the older generation easily.

Teenagers have the most disposable income and from our research and questionaires we found out that teenagers favourite genre was infact Thrillers and that teenagers watched them the most (specifically from our survey we made 72%-57 surveyed) age 15-21 , liked thrillers the most and we were able to attract and target our audience by finding out why they liked thrillers and using this in our movie,e.g. teenagers were the age group that enjoyed thrillers the most so we could easily find out why they liked thrillers and target them by using similar conventions in our own thriller.


Teenagers also enjoy the excitement and thrill you get from watching a thriller, we also found out from some teenagers who answered a questionaire on film that they expected from thrillers mystery and the feeling of "what is going to happen?" and how many endings in thrillers are unexpected but most of all ,before watching a thriller people expect tension and they obviously love it because so many teenagers favourite genre is Thriller.



Our themes are both eternal and universal such as loyalty, betrayal, revenge, sex, and power. We have the theme of the younger brother seeking revenge on his older brother (This is found in Biblical and Koranic tales such as Cain and Abel, a variation is also found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet). The theme of betrayal and loyalty is represented by the trusted mother figure who betrays both the girl and her master, out of desire of the younger brother. Finally we have the theme of power, in the mafia Godfather figure of Ilya Brodsky but what is power if he cannot save his own daughter.


One of the contemporary issues we explore in this film is how thanks to the global community and the erosion of national borders, no-one is safe anywhere especially the super rich, who live in super secure environments in particular the Russian expat community in London, has a reputation of protecting themselves with armed guards. Whether this is true or not, the perception remains that the super rich are wary of potential crime against them, and in particular the perception of many in the Russian expat community is that they have perhaps acquired their vast wealthy, through not entirely ethical means and therefore perhaps expect reprisals against them. This film attempts to explore these issues by playing on the stereo-types and leading us to unfamiliar world.
The title of our film for example is “snatched” it is quite an exciting and thrilling title and it suits the thriller genre well, it makes us want to know what/who gets “snatched”. We thought about all the conventions of a thriller genre and conformed to many of these conventions. I think our opening sequence to a thriller successfully attracts our target audience and from our audience feedback ,we found that many teenagers "wanted to know what was going to happen next" and .

I found the film questionaire that i made very useful. I asked 

 "What would you say, attracts you the most to watching a Thriller ? " 

A few examples of what some people said :

Twists and the plot coming together at the end.Tension in thrillers..!

Solving the mystery

I love trying to solve the mystery and the excitement of thrillers.Theya are fun to watch and I like how they are normally quite realistic therefore more scary.

I love the way thrillers are never obvious and i find it fun finding out the mystery. I love the excitement and tension they create and enjoy watching with friends!

I like how the excitement thrillers give you and how they keep you on the edge of your seat. I love the mystery and the unexpected endings.

Then after we made the thriller i asked questions about what they thought and many said :

If you enjoyed watching it, what did you mostly like about it?	Yes, I want to know what happens now. I like the characters & I like the suspense; the music sets the scene perfectly too
If you enjoyed watching it, what did you mostly like about it?	it looked professional....tension in the atmosphere
If you enjoyed watching it, what did you mostly like about it?	I absolutely LOVED this thriller! The music made it really suspense and the dialogue was really exciting! I particularly liked the 'warped' voice of the kidnapper - it made the kidnapper seem really frightening and put me on the edge of my seat!! I could tell it was a thriller right from the beginning because of the suspense of the music.

After the first questionaire we tried to use what people liked and use it in our own thriller.I think we were very successful in attracting and addressing our audience and we spent a lot of time thinking about the conventions of thrillers and creating "tension" .I am extremely happy from my audience feedback and i think we were on the whole very successful and succeeded in what we wanted to achieve and worked well as a group.

Groups Q4

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?If the ratings of IMDB are accurate then the market for this type of thriller is mainly under 18s, and fairly equally distributed over gender, closely followed by the 18 -29 demographic. We conclude this by examining the ratings for Taken and Shutter Island on IMDB
Young people under 18 have the most disposable income and the most time and inclination to see films. This is why all big movies are targeted at this demographic.

Since we are a young crew that fits into this demographic it is not surprising that we decided to make a movie that would appeal to our age group.

Also it must be remembered that this is a story about the kidnap of a young girl and so this film is going to have relevance to this demographic who will relate to and understand the terror and determination of a similarly aged human being. Therefore the question is not where the IMDB demographics deliberately influenced our choice of film genre but rather that the IMDB demographic breakdown reflects the interests of our age group.

Therefore it is clearly understood from this that our audience is ourselves and those like us, which is confirmed by the above research. In our questionnaire and analyses responses it was also clear that there is a slight percentage increase in the number of males who would be interested in our film due to the action, mystery and potential violence. In our analysis it appears that more females are scared by this type of genre although that is also a reason they like to view it. So both genders have an interest in this type of genre although from different perspectives. This may be somewhat stereotyped but holds nevertheless.


Although the traditional way of classifying an audience is to break it down into male, female, class, education, race and status our primary concern is to attract as wide a market as possible and not fit the film so completely into a niche market that only those who subscribe to that genre and sub genre will be interested.

It is worth noting that according to the IMDB ratings database, although the primary demographic was the under 18 market clesly followed buy the 18 -29 market – ther was till a huge amount of people right up to the 45 + bracket watching the film and this is what we would like to aspire to.


The questionaire which I made was extremely useful. I asked people what age they were and 72% of the 82 people in which answered it were age 15-21.We also found out that most of them liked thrillers and it was there favourite genre the second most popular was comdey.Both often genres which are targeted at teens. This was a good result and one of the main reasons why we also decided to target overall 15-21 year olds.

I then asked what people most expected before watching a thriller:

Many 15-21 year olds expect tension and secondly mystery which they try to solve.

Group Q3

Q 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? 

"We have created a mainstream, high production value product, that addresses contemporary issues dealing with corruption and terrorist threats in the Russian diaspora. Due to our high level of professionalism and high end production values this film is a main stream media product. To get interest from production companies we would use a tiered approach: We would post High definition edit on Youtube We would create a website devoted to the film With deleted initial scene, script outline to create a “buzz” about the product. With quotes from well know people in the industry supporting our product. This will be linked to the Youtube page to expand potential audience. Using the Website (www.snatchedfilm.com) and Youtube we would approach commissioning editors at Chanel 4 BBC. With this material we would also approach, UK based production houses such as SOHO based Tiger Aspect productions Also submitting this to as many Film festivals and competitions as possible. Including Virgin Media Shorts, London Short Film Festival, The BFI film fund and researching UK and European film festivals, and American festivals such as Rain-dance Also giving the nature of the Russian film connection we would target selected Russian individuals with money to see if they would be interested in financing out film, with a view to targeting Russian film festivals such as Moscow film festival. To create a ‘Buzz’ for this film using the LAMDA actors from Snatched, we would create a fake kidnapping of the young girl, possibly on the streets of Knightsbridge outside Harrods, to get into the papers and local and international news, giving us a platform to advertise our movie. If questioned by the police we would explain that this was a piece of performance art to highlight safety concerns around children of wealthy Russians expats in London. We would ofcourse make sure this was filmed by ‘a member of the public’ on the Iphone, and posted on Youtube to get people talking."

Groups Q2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?




Our thriller opening sequence represents different social groups, we planned to represent these social groups quite stereotypically, this way we thought it would be easy for the audience to relate to our thriller. We represented the Russian Father, Ilya Brodski`s and his family (brother Dimitri and family background) as a wealthy, corrupt, and a serious Russian family. This is a stereotype of many wealthy families in Russia, that the family is large and that those wealthy families our quite corrupt,many mafia gangs etc. It represents the middle class negatively, that they are rich, flashy and corrupt.


We also represented the little girl in two ways,first of all, as a stereotypical teenager who is demanding to “go outside “ on her own but then the father shows his authority and makes her seem vulnerable, who stereotypically needs a man or a nanny to protect her.


The nanny typically acts as Sophia`s carer (because the Father is wealthy/corrupt businessman and doesn’t have that much time to act as a full time guardian) . Our group thought that this combination of the father being in charge of the nanny,he works and the nanny acts as the mothers role,this would help to represent the Fathers serious character quite well and make him seems as a stereotypical bredwinner who carries out an instrumental role. I think we portrayed this successfully.


Lastly the nanny seems to get away with being in on the kidnapping with Dimitri so this is also representing her in a stereotypical way because it is a stereotype that girls can get away with more and that we don’t expect the nanny to be “bad”.Although you could also argue that we are challenging the stereotype because she is an evil character who cares about money rather than being the stereotypical and kind female which the audience at first expect.


Our research of these negative representations of various stereotypes helped us to easily portray the thriller genre well because they are very typical representations and are therefore easy to manipulate, for example using russian characters helps the audience relate to the fact that the father has a corrupt background because often Russians are stereotypically associated with dodgey mafia gangs (even though this isnt correct,it happens)

We also use Mise-en-scene to represent all these stereotypes. For instance, the setting of the Father,Ilya`s office,its very modern(the modern phone),bar in a background and it looks expensive which relates to the stereotype of wealthy “flashy” Russians. The father is also wearing a suit and looks like a Russian , serious businessman. The little girl, Sophia is wearing a girly, simple and quite conservative dress, with blonde hair (stereotypically blonde hair is seen as quite idealistic).


Overall, i think we have created a negative representation of Russian middle class families,often and stereotypically the Russian middle class are very wealthy and we have portrayed these characters as corrupt mafia buisnessmen getting involved with the wrong people.I think we are very successful in entertaining the audience because there are various social groups and different characters which makes it very interesting.

My Q1 POWERPOINT

 

More info relating to slide 8/24

• Throughout the film the character Alex Cross gets calls from the kidnapper,below is an insight into how it is done in Along Came A spider(could not find many scenes of Along Came A Spider on youtube so you can see this use of the phonecall voice change on the trailer at 59-1.02 seconds into the trailer and 1min .37 seconds to 1min .45 )

And this relates to slide 4/24
Jezzes character throughout the film is portrayed as good and we arent suspicious of her at all throughout the film we want to use a similar stratedgy in snatched to portray Patricia as not very suspicious.For example at 1 min 04 secs  :

My Audience Feedback

Questions I asked- Audience feedback powerpoint from gabby_wd

Feedback:

Did you enjoy watching our thriller? from gabby_wd

Positive feedback

If you enjoyed watching it, what did you mostly like about it?

I absolutely LOVED this thriller! The music made it really suspense and the dialogue was really exciting! I particularly liked the 'warped' voice of the kidnapper - it made the kidnapper seem really frightening and put me on the edge of my seat!! I could tell it was a thriller right from the beginning because of the suspense of the music.

I am very happy with this persons feedback, they noticed the "warped voice" which I infact edited, so  I was extremely happy.They said it made the kidnapper seem really "frightening and put me on the edge of my seat" This is exactly our intensions and they also said "i could tell it was a thriller from the begining because of the suspense of the music" This is what we hoped we would achieve by adding in that soundtrack so it is great to hear that it helped make Snatched seem even more like a thriller "right from the begining".

• People also said how they wanted to know what was going to happen next , which is of course what we hoped for because it is a thriller and this engima is a common convention in most Thriller films.
• 35/35 100% of the people could luckily tell it was in the thriller genre ,of course this is what we intended.

97% of the 35 people agreed that that the music we added in worked well. 

I am extremely happy the mostly everyone agrees that it worked and helped to create tension. Feedback also tells us that this is valid:"I thought that it seemed very proffesional and i liked the use of sound effects ,especially the sound of the kidnapper on the phone making him seem anonymous ,withoout the sound effects it would not be so tense....music added emphasised tense moments.."





After watching it, what was your most memorable and favourite part?

You can see from most of these responses that on the whole people loved many different parts and i am happy these respnses are varied which means many thingsare positive from snatched.

E.G.These comments below.

• The texting as it is nicely shown on the screen and it is a tool we currently use a lot which represents the contemporaneity of the video. 
• The part in the car, it's sort of a turnover. Awesome. 
• The end as we realise the nanny is behind it 
• I guess it would be the phonecall with the warped sound of the kidnapper 
• My favourite part was when the girl was banging on the window and i like the sound effect of how we can hear her shouting "daddy" it was very dramatic 
• My favourite part was when Ilya gets a phonecall,i loved the warp sound effect!Very clever. 
• "Sit down" (when the dude is on the phone ) 
• The first guy's Russian accent. 
• 
  

This feedback makes me very happy because many of our ideas were remembered and were the audiences favourite parts E.G.The phonecall and the warped voice sound effect. Also the texting which is shown on the screen which as the person says does represent the contemporary side of the video using new technologies. 

People also understood what it was generally about as you can see below  they overall were spot on , without knowing too much info:

Story x from gabby_wd

We asked people if we made it into a movie,would they go and watch it:

Obviously i didnt expect everyone to say yes as perhaps they were not all 15-21 or they may not have liked the genre thriller, even though most of the people i shared it with on facebook are probably our target age.I am very hapy with our results.

We asked 35 people to critisise it and tell us how we could improve it,they had to say a critisism and overall i think what they said was fair however some may just be critisiing for the sake of it so i could have phrased the question better.

Negatives from gabby_wd


Lastly, I asked 
"Our primary target audience was around age 15-21 years old, do you think we successfully met our target audience?"

And 32/35 people agreed that we successfully met our target audience.

I am very happy with our overall feedback as most of it was positive and I think this tells us that we achieved our goals and all our hard work hopefully did pay off!

Here is the link to the questions which i sent to everyone:

http://freeonlinesurveys.com/app/rendersurvey.asp?sid=j3ym1yh6hpap4b4477041&refer=

Final Production

Our Final Production "Snatched"