​A2 Media Studies

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to the concept of audience

As a producer of a media product they like to think they have the power and control over their audience and how they interpret and respond to the product. However, the split in power between the producers and the audience can be a power-play battle as to whether the audience is passive or active regarding their emotional and social response to producer’s media products and whether they have their own choice.

For my foundation portfolio (G321), I created a horror film opening called Hexx which was aimed at a niche target audience; our primary audience was people of both genders from the age of 15-25 and a secondary audience of 31+. This piece of production is a good example of the power play between the producer and the audience as a lot of my work was based on audience research and feedback which included a questionnaire.

When producing our horror opening, we decided to follow some of the typical conventions that would meet the audience’s expectations and although some may argue that this follows the uses and gratification theory in that it will allow them to be in control because they know what to expect and therefore, will respond in a less dramatic way, we believed as the producers we still held the majority of the power as we created suspense and tension through various aspects e.g camerawork, angles, music and mise-en scene.

The hypodermic needle model is the idea that the producer holds all the power and has the will to inject messages in to media texts and manipulate the audience so that they are powerless to resist; they also become passive or often addicted which leads to them wanting to see more. My group’s aim was to have this impact across the vast majority of our opening especially at the end as we wanted to inject the message of fear and panic in to the audience’s mind that will want them to see more of our media product and see the fate of our victim and how she initially got to that point. Although, it’s a typical convention of horrors we did this by prolonging the chase period and alternating between point of view shots from the protagonist and antagonist to increase the sense of panic and fear as the distance between them got less and less. We felt this was effective as it allowed the audience to feel involved within part of the scene and feel the same emotions as both the antagonist and protagonist. By injecting our audience with the emotions of two contrasting characters this allows it to appeal to different kinds of people with different tastes. The majority may sympathise with the victim and how scared and fearful for her life she must be; however, others that have a bigger interest in violence or play violent video games may share the same emotions of what they believe the villain is feeling such as power, violence and mystery. As the producers we wanted to inject the audience with the feeling of sympathy, fear and panic which we felt we achieved not only through the point of view shots in the chase scene but nearing the end of our thriller in which we see the young girl trip; the opening ends with a quickened zoom in shot of the victim’s face as she lays on the floor looking behind to see how near her attacker is; our aim for this was to have the quickened zooming in on her face as a representation of the advancement the villain had made as he finally captures her which is further emphasised by the establishing shot of the woods as a high piercing scream is heard. This essentially allows us as the producers to have the power as the opening is left on a cliff-hanger and unknown to the audience as to what happens and what was going on between what they believe is a victim and villain yet allows us to have the power over the audience by injecting them with the typical emotions and feelings of a horror.

Within the advancement of media texts, more and more theories were devised that had different and conflicting ideas on the relationship between producers, the audience and the text of media products. The 1970’s saw the evolvement of the uses and gratification theory and the idea that a media text/product should include a pleasurable aspect for the audience and is conflicting with the hypodermic needle model in that the audience aren’t victims or passive to the media and are in fact in control of what they watch; this theory believes that the media is ‘run’ by the audience and in fact the producers have no control over the audience. Within this theory the audience is the vital asset in making media products a success as they have to be satisfied with the product and although the producers can have power by asking the audience what they want to see, ultimately, it’s the audience that have the control and power. Even though we felt the audience may be used to the typical conventions of horrors we felt that some of the generic features of horrors were a big part of satisfying the audience’s expectations. Within Hexx we used the typical creepy haunted looking woods in the dark to create an eerie, suspense and tension filled opening and used various hand held shots and scenes in which it appeared to be a personal blog in order for the audience to identify with the character as a normal young girl that they may be able to relate to somehow and disorientate the audience at intervals. There was no shot that captured the voice or face of the villain which we felt was effective in creating an enigma and challenged the boundaries of showing a monster or grotesque face in order to gain the fearful response from the audience that they may be expecting. The uses and gratification theory applies to the genre of our horror opening as it’s a genre in which the audience chooses to watch it and has the power and control as to how they are affected and respond to the events that occur within the text. The majority of the horror film audience choose to watch this genre as they have the power and control to choose when they’re scared and what they’re going to do which they can’t necessarily have in their everyday lives; it also forms as a diversion and a way for them to escape from their day to day lives, problems and routines through the exaggeration and unlikelihood that it will ever happen to them in real life. In addition, an example of the producers having power over our horror opening is within our audience feedback in which some of those asked didn’t like the bright red of our font or the spacing and although, we could have chosen not to accept the audience’s ideas and opinion as the most important asset to the media industry, we felt it was important to alter and change this in order to fulfil the conventions of a horror yet satisfy our audience by changing the colour to a much darker, creepy red and experimenting with the spacing and font style to link with our genre and storyline.

Finally, the reception theory devised in the 1980’s is the idea that more work should be conducted regarding the way individuals receive and interpret media and text and how their personal circumstances and life experiences can affect them. Within this theory the audience aren’t passive and are in fact active and have the most power as they interpret the text in their own way as real people that are able to think and feel for themselves by decoding the messages the producer has encoded within the media text. This theory was based on Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model of the relationship between text and the audience and is known as ‘preferred reading’; the typical and untypical conventions which in my case was a horror may be encoded by us as the producers but decoded by the audience and may be interpreted in different ways depending on the individuals personal experience and their expectations from the media text. An example of this is the type of genre (horror) and the use of stars so that the producers can position the audience and create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. For example, we followed the generic feature of having a young, innocent female victim as we felt this would generate the most sympathy and panic from our audience; however, the audience are able to think and feel for themselves about this choice and may in fact have experienced something within their life that personally to them doesn’t portray women as innocent or a person to constantly be victimised and the same can be said about choosing to not subvert from using the stereotypical male villain. However this is open to interpretation as a shot showing the villain’s face is never shown and a narration is never heard; this means that the audience has the power to decide before its revealed whether they believe the villain follows the typical conventions or whether the villain challenges the generic stereotype. Furthermore, we used a shot showing a wiccan book, candles and equipment that some of the audience may interpret in the way we wanted as eerie and creepy but others may see it as a religious belief and not associate it with the reason as to why someone is chasing a young girl in the middle of the night through the woods. Hexx has restricted narration to follow the conventions and to keep the mystery of the plot and what has happened hidden from the audience which I feel is an effective form of allowing the audience to voice their own opinion, ideas and interpretations as the plot and storyline is open to what they make of it despite the initial code encoded by the producers.

Using the idea that the audience has the most power I believe the uses and gratification theory is the most applicable to my horror opening as it’s important to keep the audience satisfied by following some of the typical conventions such as setting, cast and font style, yet also keep them satisfied by choosing to subvert from the ‘norm’ so that they go through different experiences. Because of the genre, I believe the audience has a lot of power regarding their choice to watch the media text as they are choosing to experience the fear emotions; producers of horror openings can’t forcefully subject an audience to experiencing fearful and adrenaline filled emotions so even though we wanted to make the audience feel a certain way and display certain emotions throughout certain scenes of our horror opening, ultimately it was the audience’s choice to watch our opening in the first place and they are the ones that have control or choose to show their emotions, reactions and voice their interpretations and opinions.