Analyse a chosen product you've created against audience theories

For my AS production I had to create a 2 minute opening sequence for a film. The genre we chose to do was Thriller. Before beginning the production we had to research some existing products to give us an insight of the typical codes and conventions of the genre which would allow us to create a product that audiences would recognise and meet their expectations. A particular existing product we analysed was 'Se7en' created in 1995 by David Fincher. As a group we all looked at the opening segment and analysed it individually. We then presented our ideas to eachother, and we noticed that all of us had some different ways of interpreting the sequence. This links in with the Active audience theory which says that people receive and interpret messages in different ways. This is something that benefitted us as we all came up with certain ideas based on the individual analysis we did and we ended up using some of everyone's ideas.

Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet in 1994 came up with a two step flow theory where people discuss media texts in their social networks where there will usually be an opinion leader who sets the main opinions for what the rest of the group think. This relates to our AS production as during the first rough cut of our thriller opening, one person mentioned that there was too much walking from the main character and not enough action, and many other peers in the class agreed and built on that opinion. This gave us useful feedback and resulted in an extra day of filming where more shots were taken both of the title sequence and the conversation.

Once the filming has been completed, we moved on to the editing phase where many decision were made relating to editing techniques, effects, and the ways in which the media will respond to these conventions. David Morley's study of the Nationwide audience shows that audiences can receive media in different ways. They can either read it in a dominant way (or hegemonic way) which is the way the text should be read, in a negotiated way, which partly accepts the codes displayed but interprets some things in different ways to suit their own interests, or in an oppositional way which completely rejects the preferred reading. This relates to our production because the 'static tv' effect shown in the opening sequence was intended to be a representation of a CCTV camera, and while some of the audience accepted it, some of the audience thought it was a CCTV camera with interruptions from another source (the main antagonist), and some of the audience did not recognise it to be a CCTV camera at all and instead thought it was simply a transition  between shots.

To conclude, our AS production  was finished with many codes and conventions that can be interpreted in different ways by audiences, some of those codes and conventions may be accepted for what they were intended to be while other ones may be rejected and seen in a completely different light.