How Did We Represent Social Groups? - Evaluation

In our thriller, all the actors are aged between 17 and 19 making them late teenagers/young adults. We have chosen to use this age group as actors because, in our questionnaire, the most common response to our question referring to the actors' ages was '17-18 years old.'


As the main target audience is people in their late teens and early twenties, the content of the story is highly relevant to teenagers and young adults. This combined with the actors' age question responses made it clear that young adults needed to be casted, in order to connect with the target audience.


With all of us being students, the budget for this film was not exactly endless. As a result, we decided that there wouldn't be many special effects and that the film would be based in the present, so as to keep costs down.


The new location of the film was chosen because of the adjoining side-road it has is dark and dreary, and has some elements that give it a film-noir essence. Unfortunately, as all of the directing group were under 18, we were not able to be served alcohol from the bar, so had to use cans purchased by our parents which made the film lose a small amount of authenticity. This meant that the type of drink that we used would have to be taken into great consideration, as we would have to get a drink that would relate to our target audience and have them notice the drink that they had was a common drink within a pub to try and symbolise the alcoholism that is the basis of the into sequence to this film, and is seen as an inherent problem with the youth of today

Moreover, this drink is often associated with consistent overuse. People who are drunk are often more aggressive and can sometimes hallucinate. We take both of these side-effects and use them within our story to convey the problems with abuse of alcohol. Using these hallucinations as a basis, we were able to make a pastiche of one of our main influences "Mirrors"


Another way in which this thriller relates to our audience is the use of both male and female characters. This allows more than one gender to relate to the film, and allows an extra possible suspect for later on in the film which will lead on to be a murder mystery.


This sequence features a male as the victim, which is very different to many thrillers which often feature a female as the main victim, as they are stereotypically seen as the weaker gender, and we tend to care more for them than for males. This change is made in order to reflect the changing stereotypes of the modern society.


The reasons for removing the extras that would have been in the film were threefold.
1. The venue change meant that fewer extras were able to fit or make it to the new filming location and date
2. The legal requirements of getting all real patrons' consent would make it difficult to film if one refused to be filmed, or were in the line of shot.
3. The background noise may have been too loud and would have drowned out part of the Key dialogue that sends us plunging into the disequilibrium of the plot.