JessR Foundation Blog: Evaluation Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

Throughout our opening we tried to maximise the attraction of our film to our target audience through many ways:

We played on their fears, by having a kidnapping within the first 2 minutes. It’s a common fear that many people can associate with so it widens our audience appeal. The fear draws people in and so they want to watch the rest of the film. It also plays on the fears of isolation and vulnerability by having the girl home alone without parents.
As our target audience is teenagers, we decided to have the main two characters introduced in the opening being teenagers also. We felt this would help the audience to connect and relate to the characters and the audience would become more involved. As we included alcohol and technology, we also feel this would help attract the audience due to common interests.

Through the use of music, we built up tension and enigma, as for the first minute of our sequence nothing happened, but the non-diegetic music was getting louder, from very quiet and it added atmosphere to the opening.

http://www.the-numbers.com/market/Genres/

The pace of our opening was slow to begin with so the audience would question what the plot was going to be, and to create mystery. The opening then becomes faster paced as the kidnapping takes place and the disruption has occurred. This creates an action and hopefully shocks the audience.
We followed the rules of continuity, such as the180 degree rule as we didn’t want the audience to become confused within the first 2 minutes. We decided to follow the traditional narrative structure and we conformed to expectations of the horror/thriller genre by having the girl kidnapped. We wanted to leave the bigger shocks to the rest of the film.
Although the genre is horror/thriller which is a typically male market, I feel that through the use of a strong/rebellious female character at the very beginning, the film gratifies the female audience’s needs as it’s someone they aspire to be.

After finishing the opening, we held an audience feedback session, where we asked each person to fill in a questionnaire:

Group 6 Questionnaire

To attract our target audience to the screening we used posters and we also created a facebook event as facebook is highly used by our target audience: