Q5) How did you attract/address your audience?

We made sure that we stuck to the conventions our audience would be expecting. Such as Levi-Strauss’ theory of binary opposites, including good vs evil, hero vs villain (or in our case victim vs murderer. We also followed this theme through to production by using light (high Key) vs dark (low key) in the lighting to anchor the message of good vs evil. We also used common themes they would expect to see like ‘death’, or iconography such as a dirty room for the murderer, a young girl in a pink room. We had a particular murderer seeking death for a particular reason which is a convention of horror/thriller. We appealed to their pleasures by exploiting their fears. People go to see a horror filming because they expect to be scared, they expect to be confused and worried as to what will happen next. We used narrative twists such as at the very beginning the person signs in as ‘Julie’ and you then learn that person is a man, which confuses the audience. We also do no let on what the motives of the murderers are, which again keeps the audience guessing.

We also appealed to them through our production and post-production (footage and editing). We used eye catching shots like the 'keyboard shots' which not only look effective but create a sense of danger as you cannot see the persons face. We used clever editing also to create enigmas, such as the use of sound bridging. We used the sound of the printer of a shot of the victims face when really it was the murderers printing the victims address. This was a technique to, firstly, confuse the audiences as well as make them more engaged by showing the man picking up the paper afterwards, which makes them think “oh, they’re printing it! I see now, very clever”. Our audience are intelligent and like to be challenged when watching a film. They will have chosen this film because it is a thriller and doesn’t give everything away immediately, so by leaving things out and creating enigmas, we are actually appealing directly to our audiences tastes.

We had to change a few things to attract out audience more, such as adding in a drone to create a more threatening scene. This also made it more traditional.

Our audience feedback shows that we did in fact attract them as nearly all of them said they would like to see the rest of the film because of its music and interesting camera angles.
However some people did say that the contrast in lighting between the girls what’s and the boys shots. If we were to do it again we would like to have had better lighting equipment. Another piece of feedback we got was that we should have delayed showing the murderers face to create a greater enigma. I also agree with, we perhaps tried to put across too much information in the first two minutes.