Thursday, 10 December 2009

Key Concepts homework

Analysis of film: Twilight
Genre is a way of classifying media products into categories (know as genre). The movies are classified according to its codes and conventions. Codes are signs that create meaning, there are two types of codes, technical and symbolic. Conventions are the accepted way of doing something, these actions help the audience recognize certain genres.

The film I have chosen to analyse is Twilight. The film is directed by Catherine Hardwicke and based on the fictional book written by Stephanie Meyer. Twilight is a hybrid genre, this means it fits the codes and conventions of more than one genre. Twilight fits both the action and romantic genres. The typical codes and conventions of the action genre include: fight scenes, a hero, a bad guy etc. The typical codes and conventions of the romantic genre include: the main characters falling in love, intimate scenes etc.

So Twilight is definitely a hybrid of these two genres . This is made apparent by certain codes and conventions in the film. Twilight is based around a romantic entanglement between a human girl and a vampire, they go through the stages of falling in love and there are also many romantic and intimate scenes shared between the two main characters. But there are also many: fight scenes, stunts and there is a hero and a bad guy.

Twilight best fits the Todorov narrative theory. Todorov had the idea that all films follow a set structure. This structure was equilibrium, disequilibrium and restoration of equilibrium. This appropriately fits Twilight’s structure. The film starts off with a normal girl, Bella, moving to a new town to live with her father. Whilst there she meets Edward Cullen (a vampire). This is all when the storyline follows the equilibrium. When Edward and Bella fall in love the storyline still follows the equilibrium, however when Bella accidently meets another vampire (other than Edward’s family), the movie falls into disequilibrium, this is because the other vampire wishes to kill her. The disequilibrium continues right to the point where Bella nearly gets killed but Edward saves her and kills the other vampire. This is the restoration of the equilibrium.

An audience are the people who view the media text, in this case watch the movie. Without an audience the media would not survive as this is where they earn their money from and also what they keep in mind when making a text. Most media texts are targeted at a certain audience, this is called the target audience and can vary depending on the content of the media text. The target audience for Twilight is females between the ages of 12-35 as it has factors that appeal to many ages. It is mainly aimed at females as it is based on a love story. Stereotypically women would be more interested in romance than men. However Twilight’s target audience is hard to decipher, this is because the action sequences in the film may also appeal to males. I do however believe that the age of the target audience is between 12-35 as the storyline would appeal to younger generations, but possibly to slightly older people as they can possibly relate to or enjoy the love story more than the younger generations. The film was extremely popular with it’s audience. It was also very popular with people outside the target audience as well. It received “$70.6 million” (Fact from MSBC) at the box office, showing it was a very popular movie. Several critics did not take to the movie well, but overall earned generally 4 stars (out of5) or 5 stars (out of 5). A lot of reviews by fans were very positive and many people wrote negative views as they disliked the craze it had created so there was defiantly a mixed reaction to the movie. The target audience responded the most positively, showing that they had targeted the right audience.

The company that distributed the film was Summit Entertainment. Summit was never really a successful company and did not produce many very successful movies. However Twilight gave them the big break the needed, earning them a “Gross profit of $226.5 million” (2008) and the majority of this was due to the success of Twilight. Summit are an independent company that are based in the USA. Twilight was given a budget of roughly “$37 million”, which is quite a small budget, this was because the company were an independent company and could not really afford a larger budget. This however does not show in the movie, the special effects all look well done. Summit where however limited to which actors they could use and the locations they could film on due to their budget. There is no exact amount of profit detailed anywhere, however the movie was quite cheap to produce, this will mean making a profit will be easier as they will have to make less money than other films. There are no statistics, but I believe that Summit made a large profit for Twilight as it was so successful at the box office.

Twilight was very successful in engaging it’s audience, even to the point were it made a very large profit at the box office. It also sticks very closely to the codes and conventions of it’s two given genres. All of these aspects made Twilight very successful and is why the sequel was allowed to go ahead as it will probably get the same receptions as Twilight did, if not bigger.


Bibliography:
These are the website is used to aid my research
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27874581/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1099212/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_Entertainment

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