EVALUATION QUESTION FIVE

How did you attract/address your audience?

1)Addressing the audience for our thriller film was considered mostly through the character types however there were a few other factors that we used in order to attract and engage an audience. 

The narrative for our opening used various narrative techniques, both enhancing our plot and engaging an audience. The first and most prominent technique we used was flashbacks. Flashbacks are often used in thriller films especially to allow the audience to gain a full understanding of the plot and to gain knowledge of the characters. Often flashbacks will show the audience something that the characters may not know, giving the audience a deeper awareness  and a sense of expectancy that,often in thrillers, will be taken away using an unusual plot twist or in not revealing the full amount of information in the flashbacks. For our thriller we intended for our flashbacks to show something that the main protagonist had not seen i.e both girls walking together and later her friend running. This gave the impression that our character did not know what may happen whereas the audience could have a rough idea. Through the naive nature of our character and the audiences awareness of what danger she may encounter, we could keep the audience engaged and waning to see what might happen. Many thrillers such as the TV series 'Fargo' use fist person flashbacks where characters experience flashbacks of past events either they have caused or been through in order to clearly present a characters feelings on something that has happened, however we felt since our actors were not experienced it would be difficult to clearly express emotion without it becoming obvious and therefore we decided to use flashbacks for the audience only. 

Some examples of thriller films that inspired our idea by using flashbacks for the audience are:

Don't Look Now: 
Don't Look Now(1973) 'A married couple grieving the recent death of their little daughter are in Venice when they encounter two elderly sisters, one of whom is psychic and brings a warning from beyond.'(IMDB)

The film features confusing and slightly horror themes throughout, with flashbacks revealing new and already mentioned information to help the audience gain an insight into the characters and an understanding of the plot. The trailer shows a few of these scenes:

Another narrative technique used to engage our audience was the character types. Our three characters included the antagonist, the protagonist and the victim-although our protagonist would also gain the latter title at the end of our opening. These three characters are the most common within all types of thriller film including crime, film noir and horror. We used these common features within thriller films as we felt immediately the audience could identify each character and piece together the story behind them. The binary opposites created between the protagonist and the antagonist; created using costume and camera focus upon each character, was used to engage audience in presenting these opposites we could enhance the obvious traits of the characters, the innocence of the protagonist and destructive nature of the antagonist, and make clear to the audience again who was who. 

2) Our opening ends on a cliffhanger to create suspense and keep the films ambiguity. We felt, because our film is only an opening, we needed to keep our audience engaged in order to keep the opening interesting and to establish it as only an opening rather than a short film. The opening ends with our antagonist's hand touching our protagonist's arm, after which the screen goes black and the sound of a static television appears. This created a finality to the opening whilst at the same time kept the plot intriguing allowing the film to end at an appropriate point and leave the audience wondering what may happen next.

3) The mise-en-scene throughout our film was a fairly familiar setting to our target audience. The film took place both in a small woodland area surrounded by the city an on a bus journey through it. For our target audience of 16-20 year olds these areas would be fairly familiar as most people this age live in, or near, the city and in most areas woodland is common both in parks and surrounding well known buildings. We used this more common mise-en-scene in order for our film to have an element of realism for the audience and create something that could possibly happen. The recognisable location also allowed us to focus on the plot, and not have to try and explain the surroundings in the film. Many thriller use this technique in order to create something common, a woodland, into something out of the ordinary, a murder scene. Films such as:

The Shining- The setting of The Shining is fairly average, with most of the film shot in a hotel, the audience are familiar with the surroundings and can identify themselves with the story and characters easily. 








 The Conjuring- Like most horror/thriller films The Conjuring is set it an ordinary family home throughout to keep the surroundings recognisable and in having a simple mise-en-scene the plot can be explored and made far more complex. 





4) Our characters, due to the age of the actors, mirror the target audience we were aiming to engage. This was due to both the fact that the actors we wanted to use were fairly young and that we wanted the target audience to be able to relate and engage with our protagonist. The costumes used, as mentioned before reflected the character types, however we also wanted to represent age within our costumes. The subdued, plain, pastel colours of our protagonist were used in order to present an innocence and youthfulness that reflected the youth of our target audience whilst also presenting someone that seems a realistic character. The costume of our protagonist did represent the age of our character, with the dark colours suggesting a lack of such youth, however we were more focused on the character type we wanted to present when thinking of the costume. 

5) The lighting throughout our film was kept fairly natural in order to keep the opening as something that could happen however we were careful at the time of day we filmed for specific shots. The first few shots on the bus, with the non-diegetic sound of the murder reports, are kept quite dark in order to match the eerie sounds the audience were hearing. The later shots of our protagonist walking through the woodland before placing the flowers down are shot in an evening light, with the sun setting, both to present that these shots were not meant to be as eerie and also to represent the idea that something was about to happen- that as the sun goes so does the safety of our character. 

The final few shots of our protagonist and antagonist were again slightly darker in order to maintain the sense of doom we wanted to create, an inescapable feeling for both the character and audience. 

The sound throughout our piece was not complicated but included lots of different aspects in order to keep our audience engaged and interested in the story. The news reports we used were the most prominent sound feature, both reports gave a deeper narrative to our plot in adding more information on the murder and establishing our characters. 
The editing was kept similar throughout, using jump cuts to transition through shots. We did however use cross fades to clearly represent our flashback scenes, so that it would be explicitly clear that those shots were flashbacks.
We used various different camera shots throughout our piece to keep our audience engaged and our opening interesting. The main shots of the opening were standard shots including wide and long shots to reveal our characters. We took a few shot ideas from other thriller films, the antagonist was represented in the beginning using a range of hand held shots. This idea as taken, as mentioned in previous posts, from the Blair Witch Project, and helped to both present our antagonist and differ the style of filming to keep it unusual. (SHOTS OF HAND HELD PROTAG) 

FILMS MENTIONED BEFORE THAT HAVE INFLUENCED OUR OPENING

The Shining                                     Se7en

The Blair Witch Project                        Zodiac

These few films were chosen as inspiration and as the intertextual references throughout our opening as we felt they reflected  the story, setting and characters of the opening the best. 

OTHER FILMS THAT MAY HAVE HAD AN IMPACT ON OUR FILM AND AUDIENCE

The Woman In Black                          Misery

The Babadook