Media Research

Media Research

We decided that our media piece would be in the horror/thriller genre; following this we began to research other films for inspiration.

The first film that inspired our film opening is ‘Taken’ which is about a father letting his 17-year-old daughter go to France with her best friend. The trip leads to her father being horrified to hear that she is kidnapped. This then shows his rush to France and extremes he will go to, to save his daughter. This film in particular is extremely gripping and definitely uses the thriller aspect. Taken is rated age 18 and again after research we noticed that thriller/horrors particularly attract teenagers and young adults. We decided to use the concept of kidnapping within our piece and use the target audience of young adults.

We also discovered the film ‘Breakdown’ in which a couples car breaks down in the middle of the desert and a lorry driver offers to help by taking his wife to a café to make a phone call, However when her husband returns to the café she is no where to be found. This gave us the idea of making our thriller about an innocent couple where the girl/woman goes missing. The age rating for this film is a 15 again displaying these film types are more suitable for teenagers.

The final film we found was ‘Prisoners’ which is about a young daughter and her friend that go missing and the father tries to find them. This again shows that the stereotypical person to be kidnapped is a young girl.

Our final decision:

Overall we chose to go for the couple idea, we also decided that we would use a younger couple of ages 16-17 as ‘Taken’ uses; it would also be suitable for the age range we were aiming for. Our opening will contain the boyfriend to go on a frantic mission to find his girlfriend. Our film opening also features a monologue from the male character, as done slightly in ‘Breakdown’ we thought this would work well due to it only being an opening and not wanting to give too much away. We also used the horror element including a bit of gore as this seemed to come up quite often in horror/thrillers. As ‘Breakdown’ was a 15 and ‘Taken’ was an 18 we aimed our film for ages around 15-21 year olds with the overall age rating being a 15.