Our product includes a variety of social groups. These include women, criminals and rich art owners. We use props, costumes and casting to challenge any stereotypes which may be generally damaging, for example female representation.
Our main social group in the trailer is women. We include women in our film as the four main characters seen in the trailer. The women are all criminals who are stealing from the rich art collector. The boss of the operations is also a woman. This is a powerful status being the boss which represents the social group of criminals as empowering of women as they hold a high power status. We challenge the ‘girly’ stereotype of female characters in crime heist by using the gender neutral colour black for our costumes. Similarly, we use a mixture of trousers and skirts which challenge the idea that women only wear skirts. This is following Angels McRobbie's post-femenist theory. The plot is constructed to give women the power. This is done by positioning them in a dominant stance over the man they rob as well as the female boss dominating the criminal operation- usually a role associated with men. We tackle the issue of the female stereotype that they mainly desire jewellery, as we saw in ‘Ocean’s 8’. We decided to have them steal a painting as their knowledge behind it presents intelligence which is a positive connotation for the female characters. The Bechdel Test is something which interested me and once applied to films made the unfortunate lack of female representation obvious. We wanted to make sure our film not only passed the test but defied it. It meets the criteria for having at least two prominent female characters, the women do communicate with each other and they do not focus their topic of conversation on men but instead an intelligent criminal operation. This is following Angels McRobbie's post-femenist theory.
Our film represents the Boss of the operation as mysterious anonymous at the end of our trailer. We use camera shots which don’t reveal her face and therefore keeps her identity secret which increases the mystery. Similarly, we create a sinister representation by using rim lighting to enhance the boss’ silhouette. We only see the boss engaging on a phone call which represents her as detached from the criminals directly, which opens the plot of trying to fix their mistakes without the boss realising.
Another social group which presents many lawful issues is criminals. We link the criminal casting stereotype with our desire for female representation. We challenge the male domination and general male power by casting the criminal boss as a woman. Similarly, by casting the four criminals as women. They are represented as thieving as the film surrounds their heist to steal a painting from a rich art collector. This is made clear by the body language of the four characters as they tip-toe around with typically mysterious, all black, clothing while concealing their faces occasionally too. They are similarly represented as comedic as that is a sub-genre in our trailer. We do this by using props such as a joke moustache on Ellie as well as an exaggerative montage of the criminals sneaking around the mansion
There are different characters represented within the social group of ‘criminals’. I (Millie) am represented as the boss. We show this by separating my behaviour from the others such as a wide shot of me walking up the mansion steps whereas the others jokingly creep and sneak up them. My character is represented as more competent than the others as my actions are slick and concise, even with my clothing as I wear a suit at all times.
A smaller representation of a group is of the art-house collectors. We do this by using a posh voiceover to detail their wealth as well as a montage of scenic shots of the mansion and property which emphasises their wealth.
Our film creates a sense of branding which we apply across our minor and major tasks. Branding allows the production to appear cohesive which increases the professional appearance. The elements of my production are social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok-), our teaser trailer, our poster and our main trailer.
We created brand cohesiveness across our two trailers. In both our trailer and our teaser trailer use up-beat pop music to create a mischievous and comedic atmosphere to back the footage of the criminals. Both ‘Pump It’ by the Black Eyed Peas and ‘Jump Around’ create a sense of music branding due to their similar genre and atmosphere that they create. Our editing styles, differing slightly in the Trailer and Teaser Trailer, were very similar as they both included fast pace montage editing. By having this cohesiveness across the trailers, we scenically communicated the atmospheres. Similarly, in both trailers we used visual cohesiveness such as the same font being used for ‘DODGING A BULLET’ as well as the inter titles. This was extended to our posters as we all used the same ‘cool text’, yellow font. This cohesion across the posters highlights our brand’s genre and ties them together as a package of posters which is common for films. This makes our production visually recognisable. Our colour scheme included many bold colours which derived from the painting we stole. The saturated image allowed us to work with bolder colours which convey the comedic and suspenseful contrast when paired with a black background.
Another way that we were able to create cohesive branding was by using our tagline across our posters, social media and both trailers. ‘This much fun should be criminal’ highlights our key themes of comedy (‘fun’) as well as the thrilling element of being ‘criminal’. I included the tagline in my Facebook post as a ‘#thismuchfunshouldbecriminal’ as well as adding it in the caption. This makes the post colloquial and highlights the comedic and cheeky element to our film.
In order to engage our audiences, we had to tailor our production properly and effectively. The demographic for our audience was ages 15-25 however we did not want to limit ourselves to this so we made sure to attempt to engage older audiences through platforms commonly used by older audiences such as Facebook. We heavily engaged with our younger audience through social media. We used interactive posts as well as thought provoking questions in the comments. The teenage and young adult demographic require more from film advertising as they have a more advanced experience online which we catered for. The behind-the-scenes posts allowed our audience to follow our process which would be interesting for them.
Another aspect of our production that showed brand cohesiveness was through the use of our merchanside. We used images from our posters and trailers, such as the three criminals and the scenenic image of the mansion, to make the merchansie cohesive with the rest of our production.
Our cast is mainly young, and all female (apart from a brief appearence from Sebastian Windsor). This means that it would naturally attract a more female- dominated audience. We did not see this as a problem and made sure to highlight the female empowerment through our posters and social media which exhibited strong stances and all-female characters. The bold colours on our posters and social media posts also attract a younger audience as well as intruguing a general audience as it is visually appealing.
Our research into film posters such as '10 things I hate about you' made me realise how important it was for us to depict the main topic and characters in our production clearly. This research led me to format my poster with all five women positioned within the centre of the poster to highlight their significance. I also realised that an element of the criminality needed to be included as in '10 things I hate about you' by the positioning of the boy and girl, it was clear that they had a relationship. I did this by placing the painting in the hands of three of the criminals which highlighted how it was being stolen.
Lucid, informative and reflective evaluation that addresses all four questions, shows excellent understand of the key concepts, linking research to outcome, and offers a wide range of examples.
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