Dominant Reading

Group: Miya, Mei, Kris, Kellie

This is just a quick catch up session that we did as a group. We thought it would be a good idea to check what our intended dominant readings are for the different things being represented in our film opening. We have recently learned about Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory with Dominant, Oppositional, and Negotiated readings. For our media text to be successful, we want to make sure the message is clear and able to reach the correct audience. Below we will discuss our intended readings, and compare them to the intended readings we made in our Statement of Intent earlier on in the project. It will be interesting to see if our ideas have evolved. 

	List	Our intended  Dominant Reading	How we will achieve this with technical elements
Individuals	Drew Lyla Carrie	Drew: Drew is a jerk. He’s unserious, mean and stupid. He’s the main reason why everyone ended up meeting their demise Lyla: The innocent, wise character who is a slight coward. Carrie and Drew think she is “boring” because she’s too careful and wary. Carrie: Compared to Lyla, she is basically on the same page as Drew. Reckless, but also rational. She likes to have fun, but knows when to back down when things get bad.	Drew: We made Drew wear casual clothes that resembled a bold, wild male teenager (white t-shirt & short pants).  We also made our actor, Panji, perform as natural as possible because we figured it’d be better if he acted like himself while improvising his lines. Drew and Panji have similarities in terms of personality, which is one of the reasons why we chose Panji to act as Drew.  Lyla: We made Lyla wear dark blue clothes along with short pants to resemble innocence and sadness. In addition to that, we asked our actor, Lamiya, to tie her hair back because it emphasizes the boring character Lyla is (she’s very tense and serious). Lastly, just like how we asked Panji, we also asked Lamiya to go crazy with her lines and encouraged her to improvise. This way, her screams and shouts sound much more real, making it seem like the supernatural things are happening for real.  Carrie: We made Carrie use a pink t-shirt, followed by long denim jeans. We chose the color pink because pink is a mixture of red and white. Red resembles boldness and white resembles innocence. When combined together into the color pink, Carrie can be seen as a character who is bold, but also pure at the same time. Just like the other two actors, we also asked Kellie (our actor) to improvise her lines to fit her character better. This way, she’ll feel more comfortable as Carrie. Lastly, we asked her to let her hair fall loose. This is to represent her as someone bold and confident, unlike Lyla.
Social group	Teenagers  (1 boy and 2 girls)	Teenagers are often very curious about things. They are at the age where they explore and take risks and most of the time, they are doing things they shouldn’t be doing. Around this age, teens get exposed to peer pressure, where some get involved in things they do not want to be a part in so we showcased that with drew dismissing lyla’s plead to stop everything and go back down and somewhat forcing her into staying upstairs where afterwards everything goes wrong and lylas should’ve went downstairs. We wanted to also showcase teenagers getting curious and meddling with things they have no knowledge about that could potentially endanger them through how they started exploring the spooky attic-getting curious about the mysterious book with witchcraft writings that they should've left alone.	MeS:  Costume: The characters are all wearing very casual clothes since they are at home anyway, for example Lyla (just a blue sweater and a pair of shorts) symbolising innocence and fear. She has her hair up in a low ponytail as well basically implying that she does not try much for her appearance, Drew (beige pants and a plain white shirt) symbolising that he’s dense and has no creativity and is shallow. Carrie (pink shirt and blue jeans) symbolising that she's feminine and confident.  Performance: the acting for the characters are very immature, especially Drew since he’s basically a trouble maker and peer pressuring his friend Lyla. We tried to incorporate both types of teenagers, immature vs mature and troublemaker vs goody two shoes and such with Drew & Lyla. Lyla’s character is very anxious when she feels that she’s getting into some trouble.  Other: instead of using actual flashlights like normal people when going into a dark space or an attic, we made the characters use their iphones to be able to see for flashlight. I think this plays a big role in showcasing that our characters are teenagers because you rarely see a teenager without their phones in their hands.
Places	Haunted Attic	The attic was used to build the frightening suspense and to help create	MeS: To make the attic look more old and dirty, we used cardboard boxes to make the place look messier and isolated which we could imply to audiences that there is so much escapism.  We used only furniture and items we found lying around from the attic to help create the illusion of an old / unused attic. Items that standed out in our set included some old VHS tapes. Since our big sub-genre is found footage, incorporating the tapes helps create a connection to the the producers and to the audiences. We also decided to use the teddy bear in the shot as a doll prop. Dolls are very well known in the world of horror because they create a very uncanny effect which can send a message to the audience that the place is very unsettling.  We decided to turn off the lights to help create an eerie vibe to the audience to create a more mysterious situation. The use of flashlights creates attention to the audience to focus on where the flashlight points at. This can lead to glimpses of what might be lurking which heightens the sense of fear. There were windows in the attic which revealed too much light. This destroys the realism of a dark attic since there's still daylight passing through the set. Hence, we slightly struggled to maintain the dark atmosphere and had to depend on editing to create a darker surrounding.
Events	Disturbing supernatural occurrences can lead to karma	The message that we wanted to convey is to always be respectful when interacting with supernatural beings. The teenagers in this project found an old book with rituals written in it, and instead of doing the right thing by leaving it alone, they decided to mock it. This led to consequences that they had to face.	To help the audience feel the severity of the situation, the camera was filming through Carrie’s point of view 90% of the time and we used close up, shaky camera shots that felt more immersive to the audience.
Overall Message	Don’t meddle in with things you don’t understand. Trust your gut, and sometimes it’s better not to be curious.

 

How are these similar or different from your Statement of Intent?

Differences: 

• We initially wanted to incorporate a scene including another group of teenagers (2 crew members) who eventually discovered the footage, but later due to the time limit, we decided to cut that out. 

• Our initial supernatural item was a cursed board game but then we eventually changed it to a cursed book found in the abandoned attic.

Similarities: 

• We decided to keep the demographic and psychographic target audience.

• We still incorporated teenagers as our main characters.

• We still kept the original traits and characters of the teenagers the same.

• We kept our overall dominant reading: The supernatural world is not something to mess with and sometimes it's better not to be curious