Evaluation question 5

How did you attract/ address your audience?

My film holds the audience’s attention due to the fact that it is a very simple premise for a film and it seemingly has never been done before in another film, only such films are similar but not the same as seen in Scream as well as the Blair witch project. The audiences attention is held throughout the entirety of the opening sequence, due to the fact that from the beginning of the sequence we hear a suspense building non diagetic soundtrack, this is used up until the group start to talk and is resumed right after they start to walk away. It is effective, due to the fact that it keeps the audience on the edge of their seats and lets them know that something is happening right from the very beginning, making them stay on to watch the rest of it, in order to find out what that may be. We also didn’t identify the characters by name and decided to let them do that over the course of the conversations in order to let the audience piece together the information surrounding each character. To further attract people to our film we had an enigma at the start with the use of a typewriter sound effect, compiled with the text that is our title. This makes it seem as if someone is telling the story and or recalling events, so it leaves the enigma of who is doing so and why they might be doing it, further engrossing audiences into the film.

Many horror films start off in the stereotypical way, a group of teenagers doing something in an abandoned area. We got this idea from the target audience as we did a questionnaire on this and decided that it would attract more people if it was set in the woods as that what was seen on the questionnaire results. We challenged the stereotypical gender conventions by having Alice seen on screen as more boyish and less as a proppian princess who needs saving, while we see the main males as somewhat moronic and helpless which shows that the roles have reversed and the fact that Alice is the protagonist makes it push the boundaries and go into new depths with horror films. Another method of attraction that we did, was making the actors/ actresses similar ages to the target audience in order to create a rapport between the two making it more engaging for a younger audience.

During the planning stage we had a focus group, where we asked a select from the target audience about our film idea and they gave us critiques and ideas that we could have put in our film and we decided that it would be best to reach a wider  target audience by adding some of their ideas to our film.

I think overall we could have improved upon the fact that the start is a bit slow with the longer shot lengths and if we were to do it again, I would go back and change the length of them, in order to make it faster pace from the very start in order to keep the audience hooked from the beginning as it seemed to run a little slower than I intended but it still worked well in building suspense.