Evaluation: How Did You Attract/Address Your Audience?

 QUESTION 5

First of all, we did a survey in order to discover what our target audience wanted out of a horror film.

 
After learning more about our target audience wanted from a horror film, we had to actually put it into practice in order to attract the audience to our film. This point was crucial to us, after all: what is a film without an audience?

So how did we do it? What kind of factors of our film would pull in our audience and keep them continuously entertained?

Firstly we had to make it relatable.

Our film is set in the modern day, in a college with students leading seemingly ordinary lives. We did this intentionally to attract audiences by making them feel part of the film, like it could happen to anyone. We open with Alex's character humming Lady Gaga's Do What U Want, this is a popular song from this year and the type of music our audience would be into. We also add in a few more popular culture references with the mention of Facebook and use of the prop of an iPhone, both of which play a big part in youth culture today. The cast and characters were also very important in attracting our audience as all actors and extras we used were in the age range of our target audience, thus making their lives and interests more relatable.




We had to stick to the conventions of the horror genre, especially by creating tension and suspense

We had to make sure the opening was gripping and exciting, capturing the audiences attention right away. The most popular and obvious key convention of horror is blood, however, when done wrong this can look tacky and/or too gore-y, which (quite surprisingly in our opinion) is an element of horror our target audience don't tend to appreciate in large amounts. However, both of us felt that we should at least hint at the element of gore, which is why we used the special effect of the blood hitting the camera and splattering down the lens to reveal the title.
According to the survey, most people feel that tension and suspense is key to a good horror film so we tried to create a situation in which the character has feelings of tension and horror and ultimatley build a sense of suspense for our audience. Most people that we spoke to before hand told us how the music within a scene tends to build up the tension, so we put a huge focus on building up sound within the first scene.
The clip below shows the impact music has on building tension and shocking the audience. Taken from the classic film, Psycho.



We also had to make our opening believable

After the melodrama of the pre-title scene, we felt it was necessary to tone the drama down a considerable amount in order to keep the audience alert and intrigued. We tried to capture the realism using a handheld camera, naturalistic lighting, quirky jump cuts. The dialogue we used was only loosely based on our script, we stuck to the story but improvised much what we said in an attempt to make our film seem more realistic. We used these elements in order to ground the viewer and slow down the dynamic of the film in order to slowly build up into a shocking finale.

The certificate we have decided to give this film is:

               

This is because, after reading up about BBFC's film classifications, this rating seemed the most appropriate.