Evaluation Question 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

Once we had decided that we wanted our target audience to be the age range of about 15-18, I decided to take to the internet and look up the typical teenage films and see what I had found.. on a list that a 15 year old had made on IMDB some of their favourite films consisted of ...

You can see from this selection from the list that a large number of the films they had liked were thrillers or had a certain amount of thrilling aspects within the film. After finding this and noticing that a large number of teenagers really like watching thrilling movies, we decided to look at aspects of the film that we could make 'teenage friendly', in the sense that we would incorporate things into our film that we knew teenagers would like.

Characters

We knew that by having a teenage protagonist we would already be attracting teenagers to watch our film, so we decided that the whole film was gong to be based around one teenage girl and her friends. Also because the list above was made by a female, having a main character in our film who was also female would help to relate to girls with similar tastes to who the list was made by but to also draw more girls into watching our film.

With the antagonist, we tried to make them as mysterious as possible to keep our audience hooked but we soon realised that it was quite similar to the popular TV show Pretty Little Liars by having a hooded figure, like their protagonist 'A'. We decided not to change this because we actually thought it would draw more people into the film as we know millions of people watch the show (myself included) and really enjoy it. We thought that by having an antagonist like this we would attract more of our audience but we would make sure that we didn't seem like we were copying PLL, by making it a lot more gruesome and scary.

Setting/Props

We had initial ideas about setting our opening in a school, but then decided that would be far to predictable and probably make teenagers not want to watch it because it was so stereotypical. We thought that if we filmed somewhere that was a bit more uncommon to teenagers we would actually make it more interesting. This is why we chose the car park in our local shopping centre 'Cabot Circus' in Bristol. In some aspects the location we chose would also attract the audience because it is a large and very popular shopping centre in Bristol and teenagers that would watch the film could relate to being there.

Location shot: Top level of Car Park

Stairwell we used on shoot.

View from top of stairs, looking out to window.

Similar shot of stairs, like we used in the film.

We also used only one prop, but we thought it was very effective and would make our audience more intrigued. This was why we used a knife in our film to add some extra tension but to also hint to the audience what our antagonist had been doing.

Editing process

When editing our film, we decided to make sure that we edited it in in interesting and gripping way, whilst making sure that it all made sense. We wanted to make our editing interesting enough but easy to follow. We used a number of flashbacks in our editing and fade to black/white transitions to change things around a but instead of having straight cuts throughout the whole film.

Throughout the editing process we just wanted to make sure that we were keeping our audience interested, so the transitions and titles were where we put most of our focus on. As you can see below we added a number of different transitions to our film and especially focussed on the transitions with the titles. I think that out of the whole opening the most intriguing bit for our audience was the titles and the blood dripping, as said by the target audience that we asked on camera.

Here are some quotes from what our audience said about our film....

'I thought it was really thrilling'

'The flashbacks made me want to find out more, especially because they're so graphic, you want to find out what's happened and why she's running. It also builds up the tension.'

'I loved the blood dripping.'

'I looked the fact the titles were going against the blood and because the font was white it contrasted with the red.'

'The font showed that the atmosphere of the play was going to be quite dark.'

'Some films nowadays give too much away, but you didn't and I think that kind of helped.'

HD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxILkMv8fqs&feature=youtu.be

From looking at our audience feedback we were able to see that we had targeted the audience well and were able to make them intrigued to see more from our film. I also found it interesting that our female audience members had different views on the music we had used to the boys. Whilst the girls thought that the music was contrapuntal and went against the regular conventions of a thriller because it was played on the piano, the boys actually thought that it was typical of a thriller because it was quite haunting.

Overall we were really happy with the audience feedback that we got, everyone was really positive about the film and said that they really liked the way we had edited it, used the titles, music and the characters.