EVALUATION QUESTION TWO: WHAT DIFFERENT SOCIAL GROUPS FEATURED IN YOUR OPENING SEQUENCE?

Throughout the process of creating my opening sequence, choosing a target audience was important to knowing what sort of characters and types of people I was going to create in my opening sequence. As I chose a target audience of young adults to middle aged adults, mostly male, I wanted to create my characters as someone of which the audience can possibly relate to in some way and create a hyperreality around this normality distorting the audience perception of what is expected throughout everyday life.

This is seen within my main character ‘Gary’ who fits within a social group of a farther figure and befits within the typical nuclear family of the farther being the breadwinner. He is seen as a family man that looks after his family and is the parent that has a good job that supports his family, he is seen to be the dominant person within the family and controls most aspects of it and I have tried to display this within my opening sequence. Although I have created a dark side to his character, and this although possibly not so relatable as the farther figure is, it is a dark personality that possibly audiences could of seen within farther figures. Men are normally seen to be villains within films such as Propp’s theory where he stated that every film is expected to have certain characters and one of them being the villain. His theory was based around fairy tales and within fairy tales such as Snow White, although the main villain within this was a female witch, men were sent out to hunt down Snow White and to kill her as they were seen as more cable of this then a woman would have been and this is seen a lot within fairy tales.

Overall I think that my representation of the male psychopath is rather stereotypical, as this character is conveyed a lot within other thrillers and this character can be developed in interesting ways which helps to separate and make the thrillers diverse from each other. Films such as Silence of the Lambs, Saw and the two examples I have given above all display character that are strong dominant males and go into a destruction of psychopathic ways yet they are all done in different way. The character of Gary is very much so stereotypical of what a psychopathic killer could potentially be like mainly that he is male is the main factor that makes him a stereotypical character. Although in some ways he is an anti-stereotype as through my research of thriller films a lot of the villains do not start out being the farther within a family and so I think that I have gone against typical stereotypes slightly here by making it more of a shock that a family man could go so crazy. My representation of this character is most likely going to have a negative effect, as an audience they expect the man of the family to be dominant and caring and therefore not capable of going crazy and having psychopathic tendencies. Through the idea of the Hypodermic Needle Theory media have create the main male character within films to be the hero and be the dominant males that protect others, and this idea therefore has been created as a possible expectation within society. As my film is aimed at possibly these types of men and wives/children that know a man like that in their life, then this is going to have a negative effect as it questions if this is just a mediated expectation that the media have created, and if in fact male figures live up to these expectations because of the media. Furthermore supporting this idea, Strauss’s Binary Opposites theory creates the idea that as an audience we can only understand what’s good when something bad is there to prove this. And therefore this idea of one individual person being good and bad at the same time questions this theory and possibly the audiences perception of if they think that individual person is good or bad themselves. Through my audience feedback they believed that the character of Gary is yet to be fully developed as it only an opening sequence and I chose not to give too much away as to follow the conventions of one. Although they did notice that he was slightly becoming confused and seeing things that he shouldn’t and this made them question his mental state and what he is capable of. Through the support of spooky titles and the dark lighting throughout they chose to be more worried about what he was capable of rather than feel sorry for him. I feel this was a positive response to the opening sequence and this showed that I had achieved the effect I wanted, rather than feeling sorry for the character Gary, that his family has gone missing, instead I wanted the audience to fear him and this was seen in the audience feedback that I received.