Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract your audience? By Harvey Helmer

Who is our target audience and how can we market our film to them? Our target audience is 16-25 year olds who have an interest in thriller films and the typical conventions included within that genre. Due to having a young audience we have identified that the best way to interact with our audience and market to them is by using social media. This is called pull advertising and is best suited for us as it is the cheapest form of advertising. Our advertising would include a facebook page including information on release dates and where the film is being screened. We would also look into more emergent forms of pull advertising such as offering small ‘tid-bits’ and teasers, cast interviews, and Q&A videos on a youtube page to build excitement for the film. We can carry out test screening by hosting contests across our social media prescence for a chance to view the film early. These test screenings would be held in Brighton as it is local to us and is the city in which our piece was created.

How will we attract our audience to watch our film? As our film is small we will be able to attract an audience within Brighton itself known as the ‘hipster’ movement. A ‘hipster’ is someone that generally rebels against the mainstream and supports indie productions in areas such as film and music. This means that being an independent producer we can use that as one of our USP(Unique Selling Points) which will draw in our audience. Another USP is our new/emerging talent which again draws in the hipster crowd but also brings in our target audience as many young people may find newer actors that represent their generation more appealing than more mainstream, established actors.

Reviewing the response from our target audience in terms of feedback In order to find out how our target audience would react to our film we showed it to a small controlled group consisting of members from our target audience and received feedback about our film. Our audience members were asked to pick out elements of genre, mise-en-scene and cinematography to comment on.

Genre In terms of genre we asked our audience to pick 0ut parts they felt conformed well to the genre conventions of thriller. Most of our audience picked out the innocent girl being chased as the convention they believed drew them into the piece. Another part picked out was the isolation of our setting, one audience member stating “It worked really well with the genre as you used isolated places and also dark places to give it an eerie effect”.

Mise-En-Scene We asked our audience to select elements of the mise-en-scene they found impressive/effective. Much of our audience decided that our use of the red ribbon to elude to something happening to the girl was very effective one audience member saying “Prop of a ribbon seems very important to the narrative which is effective in making the audience question it’s importance”. Other parts chosen include the girl looking innocent and the sharp contrast in lighting.

Cinematography When it came to cinematography we again asked for impressive/effective elements. Our audience were very split up on this and they picked a multitude of different points, for example one audience member chose the close up on the eyes; “Extreme close ups of eyes – creates creepy atmosphere, suspension” another felt that the cinematography generally hit the mark we were aiming for; “The camera work really felt like somebody was watching her”

Feedback conclusion Extrapolating from the data we received I feel that we were successfully able to target our audience and address their needs by pandering to their expectations from the thriller genres and using the conventions we have learned about in our research in ways that suit our piece and the audience and served to help draw in the audience and leave an impression.