Task 1 - bums on seats

The film I have chosen to talk about is Mean Girls. Mean Girls is a chick flick about a girl that has moved to America to join public school, she mixes with the wrong crowd and finds herself getting into a lot of trouble. The director of this film is Mark Waters, before directing Mean Girls (2004). Mark Waters also directed the film Freaky Friday in 2003, which was another big selling chick flick both aimed at pre teens, teenagers and young adults particularly female. The film freaky Friday did extremely well which could easily draw in fans of the directors work.

I used YouGov to try and find out a little bit more about the demographics and the psychographics. The social grade of people that watch mean girls is around C2, D and E, this means that most of the people that enjoy mean girls are skilled manual workers, semi skilled and unskilled manual workers and unemployed people. This is probably linked to the fact that the target audience are most likely still in school or college and therefore don’t have a job or if they do it is just an easy weekend job. Majority of C1’s to A social class do not enjoy this film. This could be because of the mild bad language, poorly behaved characters and the excessive drinking at high school parties.  

I researched into what the average fan of this film is like, one of the general interests of a Mean Girls fan is are celebrities, there are some big names in the film such as Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Seyfried this could have drawn in viewers as these are big names in the celebrity world drawing in fans of these actresses who are both very well known for being in films that match the genre of Mean Girls. Other general interests include sex and relationships, fashion and cosmetics and beauty. All of these things are very stereotypical to a female audience and the fans of the chick flick film genre, which would explain how they all come into the film for example throughout the film the main character falls for her friends boyfriend, they also show a mild sex scene and make some mild sex references. Beauty and fashion is an icon throughout the film and it tells the audience that in the school all of the students are categorised by how they look and mean comments are made about different peoples fashion choices throughout the film.

There is a website for Mean Girls however on entry to the website you must provide your age because they are holding a competition to win merchandise and to win $1000 therefore you must be 18 for legal reasons. If you can access the website you will see this; 

As you can see the main colour on this website is pink which the main colour associated with the film, the website shows the main characters and a lot of glittery pink buttons.

All of these things would appeal to the general target audience however with the age check on entrance to the site most of the films audience cannot access the website. As you can see below there is a pink banner that has four links so that you can go and purchase the film, they also have a separate banner to access all of there social media such as their Facebook page which has over 4.7 million page likes.

Facebook was not made a big thing until 2006 therefore it wasn’t used to market the film; instead they used things such as posters and movie trailers and the more basic ways of advertising. If Facebook was well known when this film came out it would have been very beneficial for the film as most of the people who access Facebook frequently are the same age as the target audience for the film. Although the page is still popular it would have been good to use to promote the film to the younger audience.

Along the top of the poster you can see some of the main stars names such as Lindsay Lohan who has worked on previous chick flicks meaning that fans of her work will be drawn in to watch it. She is also part of the main person in the poster and clearest person in it as she is stood separately to the other characters and is split from them by the vertical title and billing block.

The font is bolder on the word mean to show tat the film will contain people being nasty to others and creating drama drawing in the audience and the bold writing is attention grabbing.

The release date is clear on the poster and the actual date is written in bold writing making the audience draw their eyes to the release date.

The 3 girls on the right all have very similar fashion sense, all of the girls are wearing pink tight clothes with very short skirts and kitten heels with perfectly done hair and although their makeup is natural they all look like they have put the effort in showing that they focus a lot on their presentation and look unlike the girl on the left who is wearing jeans, a vest top and simple flats showing that she is different from the others.