Representation through the genre

Hybrid- Comedy, Realism

What different groups of people do you have in your genre?
In our Genre there is a specific genre of teenage boys, the actors we will ask to participate in our short film will be around the age of 17-18 so will fit into the teenage bracket. our short film will be a hybrid of both Comedy and realism meaning we will have to introduce our characters very quickly as the audience need to be able to relate to them.


What are the common stereotypes?
The common stereotypes within our genre is a typical teenage boy so there are many stereotypes, our actors will have to be dressed in very fashionable clothes that most people are seen in so that there can be a stronger link between characters and audience. The guy must dress to impress the girl who will also be a character in our production. The boy will try to impress the girl but will fail this is also a typical stereotype


Are they traditional or modern representations?
Our representation will be fairly modern as the story line consists of a boy trying to get a girl, a more traditional approach would be a girl trying to obtain the boys attention. The typical representation of a teenage boy would be hanging around on streets drinking with his friends and having a good time. However we want to challenge this representation as we feel the short film will be more interesting and have a higher entertainment value.


What changes have there been in society which have impacted on the representations of your groups?
Many environmental factors have influenced the way teenagers are represented, For example the binge drinking culture our society has makes the typical stereotype change into drunken yobs that walk the street. The whole "hoody" culture also make teenagers look very intimidating as it looks as if they are hiding something, it also make young people look scruffy and as if they don't care about there appearance. There has been a lot of bad press towards teenagers over the past few years which build a negative stereotype however this isn't the case for all young people. So although our character is going against all the typical stereotypes our short film is aimed at people from the age 13-19 and i believe that they will relate to our character despite not following these conventions.

Brief Production plan

From our Questionnaire results we have decided to make a brief plan, this will help us when we make storyboard and scripts. Is shows a brief storyboard and how each minute of time will run and what happens within them.

Key:

Purple = Swap/ screen split

Green = Minute 1

Red = Minute 2

Yellow = Minute 3

Orange = Minute 4

Blue = Minute 5

Mind Maps

we have produce some mind maps so that we can brain storm ideas and get a feel for what we want to produce. we established an idea that we would produce a short film where two people would swap bodies but when we planned more we decided to produce a short film where one person will be filmed in 2 different situation but the same thing is happening to him just different reactions.

Production Mind maps

Mind Maps

Target Audience Questionnaire Results

finding out what most people look for in a short film allows me to see more in depth about what people enjoy when they are watching short films, from the graph we can see that most people really like comedy and harley any people like escapism so make a comedy which people can relate too would be a really good idea.

This graph establishes what people like when watching short films, we have chose 3 short films that we thought people would like the most. They all have a roundabout effect which is where the film starts where it finishes. Most people enjoyed watching "The black hole" this short film is about a man who gets the chance to have anything he wants be he gets to greedy and ends up in awkward situation.

We asked each one of our participants how long they would prefer a short film to be, we asked them of they would prefer 2-3, 3-5, 4-5, 5+ minutes long most people preferred 3-5 minutes but then this is a very wide range and is not very specific so we also added 4-5 minutes so give us a more specialised result and most people apart from one voted for 4-5 minutes.

Asking what genre people like really helps us establish what genre to make our short film. This information can really help us when deciding how to make our film as we want to make it successful and interesting for people to watch.

Target Audience Research

We posted 3 videos on our main production blog we have asked our target audience to watch, we have also posted this on facebook, We then followed this on by posting a questionnaire using Google Docs to get some audience feedback, this again was posted aswell on facebook.
Target audience questionnaire

Genre Research

After looking at some more short films we found that most of them are not only based on an emotion but also a hybrid, meaning that they follow more that one genre. We will be looking at basing our short film around the age group 11-16, which is basically school year 7-11. We will therefore be combining the stress of being at school, along with social realism. As we are not far off this age our self we feel than we could achieve very realistic results along this line.

Concluded Research on short films

After looking at short films presented on the bbc website i have found some very useful points i must take into account. These are:

- The characters must be introduced very quickly if introduced at all

- Short films reach a climax very quickly and then the rest of the film is used for solving this.

- The plot has to be very simple yet effective but being too complicated will cause the short film to come to a sudden end.

-The location is very important to quickly establish the setting

Although these are very little points it is essential that we take all of this into account to ensure that we follow the proper conventions of a short film

Walking Frame Productions

We have created a Facebook page and and Blogger page, this hopefully will allow us to gather more information to help with are production and to also keep us on target and allow us to update our viewers with our progress

Blogger page
Facebook page

Audience Theory

Audience Theory
There are many different theory's that explain how an audience is influenced by the media. Some of these are more excepted than others due to the amount of personal information they take into account.

Hypodermic Syringe
- Injects ideas, attitudes and beliefs into the audience who is then influenced.
- Although this theory is simple, it is very black and white in terms of the way its stated. For example not everyone that sits down and watches a violence film will go straight out and cause a fight with someone. It also doesn't take into account every ones individual backgrounds so isn't very accurate.

Culmination theory
- Watching years and years of violence accumulates and will make people less sensitive to this. For example if people constantly watch violence films then eventually people wont think of it as anything but everyday life.
- I believe that this theory could be partly correct as if people are constantly seeing something terrible it will come to a point where the shock factor is no longer there, however again this doesn't mean that with everyone watching horror films society will come to a point where everyone goes out murdering everyone else.

Two-Step-Flow
- This theory talks about how what people experience in media individually will then result in them discussing this with people, which can then influence there behaviour.
- This is saying that although it may not effect someones attitude and actions directly it may cause them to think in a different way and look differently at certain aspects of their life.

Uses and Gratifications theory
-We choose what we watch so choose by what we are influenced by.
- I believe that this theory is very accurate as its not saying we will base our actions on aspects of media we have seen but we may be influenced by it even if we are not aware of this. we base what we watch on the 3Is and 2Es
Information - Informed/ Educated
Identification - Identify with characters/ Situations
Interaction - Social interaction
Entertainment - Be entertained
Escapism - Escape from daily troubles

Encoding/ Decoding Theory
- The way in which directors encode footage with signs for the Audience to decode. However due to the fact that people come from all different backgrounds and cultures it will mean that different people encode media differently.

By understanding the way in which viewers are influenced by the media it makes it possible to create the most appealing short film possible. I believe that the last two theorys are the most feasible so I will have to ensure that i take into account target audience feedback so that the audience are drawn into the short film.