5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Maintaining the audience’s interest in the opening of a film is paramount. Because of our lack of production experience, we decided that the best way of doing this was to cause an air of mystery and confusion about exactly what was going on, by challenging some of the regular forms and conventions of Crime films. For example, we shot the tail end of a robbery in broad daylight and the environment it was shot in, a park, was also unusual. These ideas throw many questions into the head of the viewer which they want answered, and so hence continue to watch. Some questions could include how they’d gotten away with such an act in the light of day and why they were going through a park.

We complemented doing this by using music of a tense and suspension-building nature. Other common conventions we used included the storyline, character types and ideologies. By maintaining these conventions we ensured we did not lose the interest of the viewer before they’d had a chance to properly enjoy the film.

I have also asked the four people who filled out a questionnaire before we made our film to give us some feedback about how their attention was caught in the opening of our film.

Sophie

Chloe

Seb

Josh

The most obvious indicator of whether or not we managed to capture the audience is through what score they gave us for question two, which asked, 'on a scale of 1-5 (with five being extremely interested), how interested were you in seeing what happened after the opening of our film?' On this question we were given a three, two fours and a five, which suggests that we did to attract the audience worked.

When asked about what conventions they thought our film challenged, the main relative comments were about mise-en-scène and also storyline. As I've said we felt we challenged mise-en-scène fully. We felt though that we followed a typical storyline. The person who wrote the comment argued however that, a crime film opens usually with a murder scene or crime being committed, which suggests the film wasn't as clear as it needed to be about what was going on. Someone was also critical of our character types, claiming they were too young, but I'd say this is not relative as, for obvious reasons, we couldn't make the actors look much older.

Most respondents came up with the same ideas as I have mentioned when asked about what questions they wanted answered. And when asked what else about the film made them want to watch it, nearly all replied that they were intrigued as to what was actually going to happen, which suggests hat we went about attracting/addressing our audience in a correct way.