G321: Evaluation Question 5

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

Addressing and attracting your audience is a vital part of a successful film. In 'From the Night' my group used a number of different factors, such as relevant locations and characters, camera angles and aspects of mise-en-scene to attract and address our target audience.

As said in previous evaluation questions, 'Animal Kingdom' had a huge impact on the target audience we were going for. Our main priority was to attract the 16 - 25 demographic, we did this in a number of ways. First we chose a suitable location. We used a standard middle class house, similar to the one in 'Animal Kingdom', so that  our target audience (16 -25 year old middle class males) could relate better to the surroundings than they would if we were to use an upper class house. Secondly we used a young male adult of similar age to our target audience as the main character, in an attempt to allow our target audience to engage in the characters situation, and feel empathy for situation. As previously said 'Animal Kingdom' was a big influence on our thriller, and helped us to develop our target audience. Therefore any audiences which enjoyed 'Animal Kingdom' may also enjoy our film as well. The use of posters in the background also helped to address our audience. Examples of popular culture are scattered around the walls of the boys bedroom. For example the popular band Paramore. Also the Joker poster not only has direct reference to popular films of Batman, but also suggests that contemporary Britain is as corrupt just like the Joker in the Batman films, and that our thriller represents this.

Suspense was also an important part of addressing our audience. Our thriller had to keep the viewer watching, and wanting to view the rest of the film. My group successfully accomplished this using a wide variety of camera angles, such as tilt shots and high angles, and also using quick cuts between the enigmatic figures and the characters to relate the them all together. Also the use of a gun shot immediately links to a bullet ridden body, and the audience will be wondering who's been shot. Also because our thriller is shot in the night, the gun shot is a direct reference to night-time, suggesting it is a time of death, and corruption.

We decided to ask a couple of people (similar to our target audience) what they thought of our final cut. Posted below is evidence of our success.

Questionnaire Entry #1 

Questionnaire Entry #2

A lot of information on this questionnaire is positive, James found the editing the better part of the film compared to anything else. He also would be inspired to see the rest of the film, and thought the soundtrack reflected the mood, all of which were me an my groups intentions, as stated below.

Kieran on the other hand thought that our strongest part of the thriller was that it was a clear opening to a thriller film.  He also thought that the ending needed to be more dramatic, and the slow motions were the best feature.

Overall the responses from the questionnaires were very influential on the ending of our thriller openings, and that our thriller has conformed to me and my groups expectations of what we wanted to tap into, before filming.

Our intentions for our thriller were to create an easy to understand narrative, and to make sure none of the scenes were confusing. Also the soundtrack had to directly link to the thriller opening and reflect the current mood. Furthermore, our thriller had to show clear signs of an opening to thriller, rather than just a random scene within a thriller. All of these points were successfully achieve when considering the feedback we had received. After taking on board advice from our teacher and our questionnaire responses I decided to change the ending to making it much more dramatic. The original ending was a still shot of the enigmatic figure in the window, with the title over the top. But after the feedback I decided to change it, and now it's ends with the boy running in front of a cars headlights, and a quick cut to an enigmatic figure waiting in the car. I feel that this was much better ending than before, and the use of slow motion added to the suspense and cliff hanger of the thriller opening. The cliff hanger leaves the audience wondering what is going to happen to the boy, who the enigmatic figures were, and why was the mother shot. To those familiar with the thriller genre, our dark, meaningful mise-en-scene could suggest corruption, and that the happenings are all effecting the boy, as if he is trapped, leaving the audience intrigued about what could happen next.