Rochelle Thomas - Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

We aimed to attract our audience mainly through mise-en-scene, camerawork and editing. We used our results from our audience research to address our audience in as many ways as possible and make sure that our opening represented our target audience of young females. We also acknowledged things that our audience prefered for example our target audience prefer pyschological Thrillers, so we decided to create a pyschological Thriller and there prefered type of film is mainstream, we demonstrated conventions of a mainstream film through the narrative structure however our Thriller does fit into a independant film aswell because we had low production value.

1. The cuts of the numbers at the beginning of our opening give the audience a idea of what the plot of our Thriller is, the cuts build up suspense at the beginning which is conventional in Thrillers as a way of creating a enigmatic atmosphere. Overall the numbers give our target audience a insight into the complex plot behind the opening.

2. As our target audience are young females, we wanted it to be evident that we were trying to attract them so we chose a young female who is a student to be our protagonist, we wanted our audience to be able to relate to our character. We challenged the stereotypical gender conventions by choosing a female as our main character, most Thrillers tend to have men as there protagonist however we wanted to challenge this convention by choosing a female who can be presented as vulnerable and a vicitim at all times, adding suspense. We mainly used mise-en-scene (school books, school uniform) to address that our protagonist is young and is a student. Its obvious that are Thriller is set in a school, from the longshot of the classroom making our Thriller realistic and able to relate to. The longshot also helps to show that our protagonist is isolated not like your usual stereotypical teenager.

3. We used sounds and close-ups to make it obvious to our target audience that our film is a psychological Thriller, the close-ups of her ears, eyes, hands are purposely done to address to the audience that she is anxious, paranoid and on edge. The close-up of the ear demonstrates that she is a troubled character psychologically and that time leaves her distraught. The sirens suggests that the character has fears that are affecting her mind leaving her paranoid, her constant restless movements show that she is nervous and that the problems within her mind is the plot of the Thriller. Overall through camera and sound we made it evident to our target audience that we interpreted the sub-genre they prefered.

4. We used special effects during our editing and created news headlines on photoshop to include in our opening, as a way of representing the fears of our protagonist. We could only express that our character is troubled through body language, so we used the headlines to make it more obvious that she is troubled within her mind. We used the cut-a-way tool on imovie to make our headlines overlap our characters head, interpreting her thoughts. Again this will attract our audience as it will show we acknowledged there preferences of creating a psychological Thriller and our audience may be able to relate to the stress of meeting deadlines at school or college.

5. Unlike most Thrillers we didn't use a dramatic soundtrack instead we used a constant ticking sound throughout, as we found that a soundtrack wouldn't address the main concern in this film which is time. In order for our target audience to relate to the anxiousness of meeting deadlines, we had to interpret time within our sound.

6. The Thriller 'Se7en' by David Fincher, shares some similarities with our Thriller through the ways in which it attracts its target audience of males between the age of 18-29. The close ups of the mans movements during the opening suggest to us that the target audience of this Thriller enjoy films that involve hunting down someone or something, the whole opening consists of extreme close-ups however our opening gives us a sense of the personality of our protagonist. Similar to our Thriller, the actions of our protagonists are important as it helps us understand what the plot of our film is. David Fincher uses the close-ups to address the actions of his protagonist as a way of building up suspense to the opening similar to ours. He doesn't use a dominant soundtrack which is conventional in a Thriller, he decides to use a repeated sound that perhaps reflects on the plot of the film.