Freddie Roberts Media Coursework Year 1

 

  Statement of intent: For my ITVX thriller Spectres , a hard-boiled detective pairs up with a tech savvy teenager to solve multiple missing person cases. For my billboard posters I would make sure to feature at least two user groups, the detective who is a male and the teenager who would be a female. The target audience of 16–25-year-olds have grown up in a media saturated world so the element of technology should be featured on the posters through the use of mise-en-scene. I will have two separate posters featuring the two user groups and then I could have one poster with them together and a final one of a masked antagonist. I would use the background of a woodland for all four as this is where the disappearances will happen and the location the story is set around. To engage my target audience of 16–25-year-olds I would need to represent the tech-savvy teenager positively. I will make the teenager look heroic through the pose and the costume as teenagers are often represente...

  This is the mock poster I created for my rejected idea. The main reason I didn’t think this poster was appropriate because it features a middle-aged male detective, and this would not engage the 16–25-year-old target audience as they are not represented. The body in the background has blood on it and this would not go well with the ASA rules as I can’t show too much violence as this will scare children. For these reasons I chose not to pursue this concept further. When I decided on my idea, this was one of the concept posters. It clearly shows two user groups, a young male being the detective and a teenage girl being his helper. This would engage the target audience of 16–25-year-olds as they are represented in a positive light. They are not antagonised and are shown in bright colours which presents them as a positive character so will be likely to watch the series but if they were represented in a negative way the target audience would not be engaged.  The detective is dres...

  Ideas for media coursework:   IDEA 1- a big city male middle-aged detective investigates a series of murders and on each of the bodies there is reference to the detectives past and personal life. He must race against the clock to discover who the criminal mastermind is before he is the next target or more people get hurt. Positives- typical conventions of a thriller such as a middle-aged male detective, a wicked antagonist and a race against time makes it identifiable as part of the thriller genre. The detective thriller has been repeated lots of times so the audience would be familiar with the storyline and characters which allows them to better understand the narrative when they watch it. Negatives- the target audience of 16–25-year-olds would not relate to the protagonist because of his age. When looking at Uses and Gratification theory, they would not get the personal identity satisfaction from viewing this show as they cannot relate to the detective because of th...

  Popularity of TV Thrillers and audience: The thriller genre for television in the UK is and has always been popular amongst adult males and females as it provides an edge of the seat viewing experience that is suspenseful. Audiences have watched these programmes and been inspired to create fandoms which are groups of fans who are committed to the tv show and discuss it regularly. For example, on the website Fandom there is a Wiki page dedicated to Line Of Duty and Silent Witness. There are also lots of intertextual references with shows like Magnum P.I referenced in films and other media products in popular culture. Some actors who have portrayed characters in TV thrillers such as Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock have become popular because of their roles and characters are instantly recognizable. These series set up a binary opposition that make us root for the good guys and have a hatred for the bad guys such as ‘H’ in Line Of Duty which their mysterious identity left fans in...

  Numerical data and audience figures: The TV thriller genre has been around for a long time and is still extremely popular which means  big audience spectatorships for series finales. For example, in the UK, Silent Witness aired for its 14 th season in 2011 and had 5.877 million viewers in the UK. Line Of Duty which was another police thriller aired its finale and it had 12.8 million viewers which was 56.2% of the UK’s television audience. In America, The Fugitive finale in 1967 had an astonishing 78 million viewers and Magnum P.I (1988) had 50.7 million viewers. In the UK, there are lots of thrillers such as Happy Valley (2014) and Death In Paradise (2011) which aired between 7-10 pm also known as the prime time slot in which most adults in the UK watch television. In 2019, a massive 41.9% of UK audiences engaged with the Drama genre and thriller genre had over 500million demand expressions.