Evaluation Post 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

In order to attract our target audience we used the Uses and Gratifications theory. This approach focuses on why people use particular media rather than on content. The uses and gratifications theory states that people consume media for the four following reasons:

1. Diversion/ Entertainment- escape from everyday problems, an emotional release.
2. Personal Relationships/ Social Interaction
3. Personal Identity
4. Education

Please look at the mind map I have created below showing how we used the uses and gratifications theory:

Uses and Gratifications Theory in Our Opening Sequence by prudence carter phillips

We also aimed to attract our target audience of fans of Psychological thrillers by sticking to the conventions of the genre:

• Props such as the knife which build suspense and questions in the audience's mind
• Grace is the typical strange character who evidently has bad intentions
• Atmospheric music which helps to build suspense

We also used continuity editing throughout our opening sequence such as match on actions between shots which increased the realism and plausibility in our film, this is attractive for the audience.

Audience Feedback

 During the production of our opening sequence we gathered feedback from a sample group of 8 people from within our target audience in order to find our if we were succesfully attracting our audience, and if not what we could do to improve this.

Our sample group included an equal number from both genders and a range of ages from within our 15-24 target audience age group. 

We asked our target audience to fill our a survey of feedback at two points in our production process:

1. after our rough cut/test shoot
2. after our final edit.

Below is a chart of the feedback results we received from the reaction to our rough edit:

This feedback was extremely useful to our group at this early stage in the process and allowed us to take a step back from the project and realise some big changed that needed to be made:

• Improve our characterization, which we knew would be possible as we would be using our real, extremely talented, actor for the real shoot which would help with this problem a lot.
• Get across the overall plot of the sequence more clearly, as from an outsiders perspective the plot was not as clear as we ourselves believed it to be. We planned to improve this by using a better location and we went back to our story boards and changed/added in new shots to make the plot clearer.

Our second set of feedback we received after our final edit was much more positive:

Looking at the difference between the two charts, we can clearly see that we managed to improve our sequence to eventually attract our target audience extremely well. The overall feedback after our final edit was 100% positive with every member of our sample group saying they would watch the whole film.