Looking at my A2 Media Course Work - the Trailer for a film, as well as the rest of the Marketing Campaign along with it, our Product would appeal to a variety of Audiences.
In my group I worked behind the camera, so I had to keep in mind that I need to make the footage engaging and able to bring audience pleasure to almost any social class.
In the trailer I took care to underline the fact that the girl, who is portrayed as a damsel in distress at the beginning - being abandoned by her best friend , has actually been the villain all along. This is a way to break the stereotype of women being abused in thrillers, which is a typical convention of the genre
(e.g. Hitchock) . That would surely be refreshing to any gender .
The specific target audience for our product would be quite narrow. I consider their age would be16-30, social class C1/B. A Reformer by the psycho - graphic profiling. This person would be the main target of our advertisement in general, a highly educated person who cares about the world around them . Who would get the message behind the film and its idea, who'd appreciate the micro and macro features used to create emotions in them . Other social groups that we have targeted would be C2/D as they might have gone trough a mental illness or are suffering from something similar and can relate better to the main character. They could be a Struggler, knowing what it's like to be an outsider or an Aspirer - someone who seems to be trying to look like they have it all and know the struggle of the main character who deals with break downs on a daily basis.
The Audience pleasures drawn from our product cannot be the same as if it was the actual film. Nevertheless, we've tried to use a feature for every kind of viewer, so that we'd try to please as many types of audience as possible.
Psychological Thrillers have a guarantied audience that is in love with the genre and more or less knows what to expect . That is why most of our thriller conventions are highlighted in the trailer to bring their attention and make them want to see the film. There is a fine line between pleasing the audience by letting them ''predict'' the conventional parts of a film and switching the genre up entirely to confuse them. So we changed only a small bit of the narrative up. Our main character is a girl, she is also the antagonist and her victim is her best friend . This is rarely used in psychological thrillers as there's mainly a male antagonist and a love relationship between the antagonist and protagonist .
I suppose this change will arouse interest in more audience types. Another change is, in terms of our trailer we made it look like we've shown the end. This would either make people wonder and want to see the film or make them feel like we've told them the story so they would lose interest.
Our product was intended to provide a feeling of escapism for those who don't resonate with it and a feeling of identification for those who do.
The so called Hypodermic Needle also known as The Magic Bullet perspective, is the idea that what the media wants can be ''injected'' into the audience's mind and influence them. The case in our sequence might as well be the tearing down of the ''damsel in distress'' stereotype. Or the violent knife scene, although no actual violence is really shown .
Stuart Hall has also addressed theoretically the issue of how people make sense of media texts. He argued that the dominant ideology is typically inscribed as the 'preferred reading' in a media text, but that this is not automatically adopted by readers. The social situations of readers/viewers/listeners may lead them to adopt different stances. 'Dominant' readings are produced by those whose social situation favours the preferred reading; 'negotiated' readings are produced by those who inflect the preferred reading to take account of their social position; and 'oppositional' readings are produced by those whose social position puts them into direct conflict with the preferred reading .
Hall insists that there remain limits to interpretation: meaning cannot be simply 'private' and 'individual''.
Hall's theory is very useful in helping me understand how certain social groups would view the ready media product and the trailer, which would of course bring up different issues and appeals. Not many would pick up on what our narrative is trying to connote, however they might still enjoy the cinematography used to create suspense and mystery. Also the variety of shots provides an intriguing sence of duality and grants the audience with confusion they are eager to resolve by wanting to see more of the film.
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