Thursday 9 February 2012

Q5 - Reflective Evaluation Isabel Wong

The 5 films I've picked out are : Sixth Sense, The Grudge, The Ring, Poltergeist, The Innocents

This is the user ratings report of Sixth Sense, it shows the males and females under 18 as majority of users. It is a certificate 15, in the film, there is no use of strong language and violence or durg taking scen in Sixth Sense so it matches the requirement of being listed as a certificate 15 film.

This is the user rating report of The Grudge, the distribution of users is quite even, where age group under 18 and age group around 30-45+ are both the majority of users. It is a certificate 15 film, same as Sixth Sense, there is no presence of any drug taking or abuse scenes or use of strong language.

This is the user rating report of The Ring, same as Sixth Sense the group which contains the largest amount of users is Aged under 18, in which female under 18 is rated the highest. It is also a certificate 15 film.










This is the user rating report of Poltergeist, same as the films above, the age group under 18 has the highest rate of users. But there's a slight difference here, as males under 18 rated the most here. It is a certificate 15 film.










This is the user ratings report of The Innocents, different from the films above, its highest rated age group is groupd aged 18-29. It is a 12A certificate film.




Certificate 15 means films only suitable for 15 years old or above, subsequently anyone aged below 15 is not allowed to watched a '15' film in a cinema or rent or buy a '15' rated video work.
The use of discrimination-related language or words is prohibited. For sexual, drug taking and violent scenes, they must not be demonstrated in details and never make them imitable. Especially for drug related scenes, the use of easily accessed drugs and high;y dangerous substences as props is not allowed. Some common strong language like 'fuck' is allowed to use but there is a limited standard on using strong words, for instance 'cunt' is the strongest term that could be accepted in this case. Too many repetition of strong language is not allowed as well.

Certificate 18 means no one younger than 18 is allowed to watch an '18' labelled film or renting or buying it.  There is not much limitations on '18' rated films since adults should have their own choice
of entertainment. But any events in the film that would encourage illegal activities is not allowed.
There shouldn't be any encouragement of drug use or violence in the films.
Too explicit sexual works which might stimulate or arouse sex is classified as 'R18' while educational sexual scenes are not problem to show in an '18'


We've watched a lot of horror films with children and teenagers as victims, this has given us a very important idea that to appeal our target audience who are teenagers, we need to create a mutual threat for them. We need to make the story to be more similar to their daily life so as to engage our film with their daily routine. So mutual threat will be the major thing they are going to enjoy.

We don't target a particular gender since we would like to draw as many audience as we can to our film. Therefore, male and female at the age 15 will be our target audience. In order to make our film more engaged to our target audience, we deliberately selected a boy as the victim of our film. Since we know female audience are the ones easier to be scared while male appear to be more challenging to appeal. So base on this reason, we've made more mutual threat for our male audience in order to draw them more into the film.
In order to engage our target audience, we've picked our filming location in a park where everyone can easily access. As most of our target audience are students, they are the ones who go to park very often as well, so we think we've picked an appropriate location to appeal them. Likewise, the part they will enjoy is going to be the mutual threat we create for them. Since they walk pass or go to parks everyday, whenever they are near a park, they might think of our film then. The thing they will be looking to see should be the horrible backstory behind the park, this might make them feel creepy about parks. Also, we've made the swings and other facilities in the park move on their own, this fits the convention of our sub genre. Mist is also put into the film, the unlikelihood of the appearance of mist in parks could further create the sense of mystery.

In terms of casting, we have chosen actor and actress at the age around 15 in order to fit our target audience. As mentioned, the major strategy to appeal them is mutual threat, so we tend to make everything closer to audience's personal life, then we would be able to leave them an incredible impression by effectively making use of mutual threat. So the resemblance of our actors' age to our target audience's age is really important in putting our film on a successful stage.

In our title sequence, we've put the girl's family footages to tell the backstory of the film. Since family videos are common within our target audience's families, this is another way to create a mutual threat for our audience. As soon as they know about this horrible story related to family videos, they are more likely to be scared or haunted when they look at their family videos again. Also, our target audience are still very young, they might even have been their own family videos, this mgiht make them start thinking if they will be murdered in the way the girl had before. Likewise, the clips we use for the film are quite shaky and jumpy, this makes our film to look more real in our audience's eyes, so this is one of the factors that brings our film to success.

Since our film is named 'The Lullaby'. We tend to make the music to be more lullaby-like. Furthermore, for our yound audience, lullaby should not be a distant memory for them, they might even have some favourite lullaby. So the idea of creating an errie lullaby is just appropriate in haunting our audience's head. This makes lullaby to become something creepy in their mind.

We have received very positive feedback from our classmates and they pointed our that we had a fabulous title sequence with excellent music, various types of shots were also used.  They even gave us very high mark for our film. However, this makes us realize that we were too harsh in the marking of our film, the mark we gave ourselves was just way too low when compare to the marks we received from our audience. So I'm really happy about the comments we've received on our final film.

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