Main task- Evaluation Question 4 + 5

Who would be the audience for your product?

How did you attract/address your audience?

Considering the somewhat disturbing nature of our product, being the occurrence of a murder, heightened by our character choices of a young boy and teenage girl, we firstly considered our film opening to be best received, and eventually targeted towards an older, more mature audience. However after thinking this through and considering more ambiguous factors such as the use of sound, mese and scene and also the presentation of characters, we became uncertain in what qualified a film to be given a certain rating, and whether it may in fact be targeted more towards a younger audience. From this, we sought help from a well-known company known as the British Board OF Film Classification. This website clearly described the guidelines of film classification and helped us ultimately decide upon a rating of 15 due to the little gore or sexual references, however the implication of a very controversial topic.

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/guidelines/15-2/

First and foremost, our character choices certainly had a large influence on the chosen audience of our film opening. I believe the use of an 18 year old girl will attract the attention of that general age range throughout society, and interest all genders due to the complexity of the scenario, being that it is ultimately an intriguing situation from the outset and throughout. As well as this, I believe a younger demographic will be interested in the content of our film, considering it does not include the typical characteristics of a psychological thriller, and it’s a fairly fresh idea in terms of the plot.

Choosing an appropriate soundtrack for our film was very important to us, considering we understood the impact it can have on creating and developing moods and tension amongst the audience as the film develops. After sifting through many different tracks, we eventually found one that fit well with the timings and pace of our opening, as the music softened during location shots etc., however became deeper and faster during tense scenes such as the murder of the young child. The music we eventually came to include in our film opening is by Roy Todd and is featured in his album ‘Tomorrow begins today’.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGZ6YResVuc

Although this music may not have appealed and helped in attracting a younger audience, I believe the music is hugely effective in creating a fairly sad and hopeless mood throughout the film, emotions everyone can relate to in one way or another. This is achieved through the regular dips in speed/tempo of the music and is extremely well suited to the pace of our product. The classical music we chose to use for this product, stereotypically, will be much more suitable for an older audience; with this in mind, we believed this only diversified our film and helped to attract a variety of demographics from the young to the elderly through our varied themes.

In relation to the mese en scene, including location shots, lighting, and editing etc., we very much addressed the average, middle class demographic when taking into account the location of our shots, the house itself, and even the clothes ‘Emily Roberts’ is seen wearing. In terms of editing, we do not include many fast cuts, as instead we use regular fades both in and out of shots. We felt this was more appropriate in terms of the pace of our film in general, and also the way it went with our soundtrack. Through research we have noticed that people of our age enjoy the thrills of a fast pace action/thriller. As a result of this, this particular aspect of our film making is probably addressing an older, more mature audience in the way it progresses slowly through the film, meaning it needs to be thought through, as opposed to getting straight into the action.

Overall I believe our best addressed target audience is that of the ages between 15-40; although this seems like a large gap, when thinking about all individual aspect of our film, and who this best addresses, it seems to be demographics of all ages, classes and most certainly genders.