Evaluation AS 5

Q5) How did you attract/address your audience?

As part of finding out what I could include in my opening sequence, I had to explore ways of which to attract the audience and how I would go about doing so. In order to help me, I looked at the work of successful thrillers of the same target audience as ours and took inspiration.  For example, I looked at thrillers with the audience of 15 such as Scream 4. There is a lot of gore used throughout the film however the concept and level of how barbaric it gets is minimal, therefore when it came to filming my opening sequence I was confident in knowing that if I wanted to, I could include swearing and a lot of violence. By looking at successful thrillers and taking inspiration from them, I was able to generate unique ideas and as a result of it I came up with ideas that I felt would attract the audience that I wanted. I was able to do so by adding youngish characters, therefore making them a big part of my thriller as the audience that I want to attract is young. I also took it amongst myself in order to help with my research towards getting a better understanding of thrillers.

I was also aiming to attract my target audience by carrying out various types of research that can be seen on my blog (danniellacrossmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013). I created a questionnaire which helped towards get the audiences opinion so I could adapt it into my opening sequence and therefore it would be more successful, as if the audience have their say in what goes into it, they will be more willing to want to watch it and then tell their friends about it. This means I would gain more views, which leads to more people talking about my final product so that we can achieve what a good reaction from our audience.  For example, in my questionnaire I asked questions such as 'what setting would you personally use in a thriller?’ where 32% answered that they would film a thriller in a house. This meant that I could take from this that using this would make the audience want to watch my opening sequence and therefore my opening sequence would gain a lot of popularity. Moving onto the rest of the research that can be seen on my blog, I looked at age certificates and the BBFC. Researching through the age certificates and the BBFC allowed me to get a clear understanding of the do’s and don’ts of which I could include into my opening sequence that my group and I were working on. This therefore determined whether the final product was successful or not. Furthermore, I worked to help attract the ideal target audience to our thriller, I studied a varied amount of clips from thrillers that I saw as very successful, such as: Sleeping with the Enemy, Halloween Town, Fatal Attraction, Scream 2, Saw, Black Swan, Shutter Island, The Strangers and many more. This allowed me to get a lot of ideas and inspirations, before developing these inspirations into my own work so that my opening sequence with my group is successful. Having done all of this research, I felt that I was able to go into filming confidently because I had learned different skills that other directors and producers have used, and applied it to my own work. Some inspirations that I took from a lot of these films can be seen in my opening sequence, for example, when the killer enters the vulnerable house, it goes to point of view for the camera shot. I wanted to include this because it made the audience unaware of what’s going to happen and in heightens the sense of enigma. I also included a knife as part of the iconography and I got this idea from scream 2, I used a knife as I felt this was a widely used weapon that was conventional to a thriller and would portray fear and tension the most to my audience. By gathering this primary and secondary it helped to assist my group and me with an outline as to what targets I need to meet in order to gather our audience and attract them into watching my final product so it is then successful.