Question 5

How did you attract/ address your audience?

To attract our target audience we used a variety of different ways to relate to the audience. We did this by researching what teenagers (our target audience) did in their own time and we categorised them into social groups. The social group we particularly aimed for was the ‘stereotypical’ teenager that lives a mundane life of hanging around with friends and doing school work.

In our production we used a teenage cast, which would relate to the audience and attract them. We shot in a teenager’s house to give the audience a sense of familiarity and, using our research to find out of the audiences fear of technologies, we used props to relate to our audience. We chose to use a Blackberry phone because this was a popular and commonly used phone that people between the ages of 18 – 25 used very often. This prop, with a pink cover, was used to attract many females that, shown in my research, are very popular thus attracting them successfully.

The costume of our character was typical teenage clothing and was also used to attract a female audience who could relate to it and a male audience who could admire the female cast. The props, such as the handbag and mascara, were shown clearly to relate to an audience that goes out regularly and uses these props when getting ready to go out. This attracts them because they can feel a connection with the character and is much more effective when the character is killed.

Another way we attracted the audience was to refer to other horror movies. Two movies in particular we used were Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). These both used similar techniques, in which they challenged conventions by killing the most popular actor first. We related to Psycho by using a bathroom scene as the place of the murder. This attracted an older audience that remember the famous death of Marion Crane. A younger audience can also relate because Psycho is portrayed in many of today’s T.V shows.

We also attracted a teenage audience by referring to Scream. We did this by using a caped villain, which was also done in Scream as the famed villain known as ‘Ghostface’. From IMDb I learnt that this film was very popular among teenagers of the age 15 – 29 years old:

So by relating to a very popular villain we were certain to be successful in attracting our target audience.

Our media product was shown to our fellow student, who filled out a questionnaire rating our camera work, lighting, etc. They also commented on our overall product and what we could have done better and a lot of people commented on the lighting. Another highly commented problem was the sound effects and how the timing was not synced with the actor’s lips. We read these comments and tried our hardest to fix and perfect them.

I think we were successful in ‘hooking’ the audience with our horror opening because the feedback we attained was very positive and one question asking “Would you watch the rest of the film?” was answered ‘Yes’ by almost everyone. This shows that we were able to attract our audience by using aspects they could relate to such as other films of the horror genre, popular props and a close relationship to the characters.