Zoe Rutland - Question 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

From our audience research results, we delivered on their preferences to a great extent. Our distinctive narrative and interpretation of this through our use of colour, fast paced editing and intimate camerawork will attract our young audience, and we’ve referenced many of their preferences, such as the theme of isolation and suspense.

We also decided on a 15 rating for our film, appealing to their age range and allowing us to include certain features, such as strong language and mild violence.
However, it was also clear that the comedy genre appeals to our audience, and so we could have included elements of humour in our opening. Despite this, it was a hard thing to do and we didn’t want to ruin the dynamics of the opening and so didn’t use any humour, possibly hindering our audience’s perception on the final product.

Audience Pleasures

As a group, we wanted to achieve an opening that consisted of strong supsense and tension, as these were not only our audience's preferences, but the strong audience pleasures the Thriller genre always offer.

Thrillers propose many audience pleasures, including:

- tension

- suspsense

- a thrill

- being misled

- a sense of fear

- allowing them to uncover clues

We've made use of a select few of these within our opening through the use of constant cutting towards the end and the simple soundtrack, building suspense and tension. However, we’ve also tweaked some of these pleasures considering our target audience, as our film is rated 15 and so imposing a strong sense of fear and thrills on an audience as young as this wouldn’t have been suitable considering the bffc guidelines.

Final Product vs. What we'd hoped to achieve

We were hoping to achieve a product that imposed a sense of fear on our audience, yet this isn’t as prominent in our opening as it is in our narrative. Despite this, I feel the strong success of the tension and suspense created overrides the need for thrills to be present, and if we were to create the rest of the film, we would include this audience pleasure dominantly.