Film Poster Critical Reflection
How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
“The House” poster is racially diverse, it has people from multiple regions across the world from Latin America to Japan. This challenges the conventions of western-style comedy action movies where most characters are white or black apart from the one-off minority who are mostly used as a gimmick or stereotype (take Johnny English or Rush Hour for example). The North African setting challenges the norm of having movies take place in big well-known cities (think of any blockbuster movie). We hope that the racially diverse cast could pull people from multiple races and social groups together to feel the adrenaline and laugh together. We also decided to pull 2 contrasts together, the sweet and innocent nature of ice cream and the violence and anger in firearms, challenging the convention in action movies of their serious nature (especially for the antagonist)
How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
The poster engages with audiences in multiple ways. The star appeal of the main cast should attract the attention of the public. The diverse cast could make them a hot topic in their own countries and bring communities of film lovers closer together as they talk about their favourite actors working together in a project. We want to encourage active audiences to use their imagination and try to guess the plot by leaving the poster quite open-ended in terms of interpretation. We also tried using desensitisation to scare off families. The provocatively dressed female on the right would be a harrowing sight for parents who are often offended by the slightest of revealing outfits. However teenagers, being more open to modernity, may be desensitised to the sight of females in revealing outfits and so be more willing to go to the cinema to watch it. The same may be true for the shirtless man. I took this into consideration after knowing what happened to “South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut” where parents thought it was an innocent cartoon only to be met by extremely inappropriate (sexual) comedy involving (sic) Saddam Hussein and Satan.
It could be distributed as real media through 20th Century Fox. A movie with many stars deserves publication from a big company like 20th Century Fox. I also chose them because they have a history of mass promoting EXTREMELY provocative movies such as Borat (which is incredibly sexist and antisemetic). It really depends on how far the jokes could go in the movies. It could lean more towards satire than general comedy. If the movie is headed towards a safer direction, Universal may be another option, especially because they are an extremely big name company which could further promote the movie.
How did your production skills develop throughout the project?
I didn’t really develop that much despite the fact that it is the most complex edit I have made on MS Word. Most of the things I did I have done before while making memes on the internet and edits of friends. So in conclusion, I don’t think I gained much
How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?
Barely any hardware was used in this project. We used mostly software and online technologies on this project. I used software to edit and online to share with group mates and find resources. Other than that, nothing much happened. I just used MS Word to edit, Google Docs to share the poster with group mates (and friends for laughs), and Google Image Search to look for resources.
