EVALUATION Q5 by Maria Beardall

How did you attract/address your audience?

Through our development of product we asked members from our potential audience for constructive feedback, and how we could improve our piece to make it even better.

 

Feedback from Henri Wilcock-Fitzsimmons (17)

Feedback from Melissa Thomas (17)

Black and White & Saturated Filters:

H

- similar to 'Doctor Who'

- black and white makes character look abused

- makes sense

M

- liked, created a clear contrast; could tell were separate

 We used two separate filters, which we wanted to do from the offset, to really convey to the audience obviously that the clips are individual yet entwined together, and that both have very different tones: the black and white clip connotes she is vulnerable and has been tortured in some way, and is supposed to be very negatively portrayed to the audience, whereas the saturated clip is to show that the audience's senses should be on edge and that as it is so disorientating there is something wrong. We used the filters as inspired from Kill Bill, one of the films that also uses black and white filters to make it stand out. We believed that these filters would be appealing to our audience as they are actively viewing the piece and therefore wanted to create an alarming enigma that our audience would crave from the thriller genre. We wanted to engage our audience and also not confuse them in a sense that the clips are separate, but generally confuse them to what will happen - therefore in post production we added in the filters to feed the audience hints that would keep the film appealing to turn a potential viewer into an active viewer.

Henri and Melissa both liked that the filters separated the clips and commented that it was clear to them and made sense, and also that it gave a feeling of other similar things watched by our target audience, such as Doctor Who. This works to attract our audience that we wanted to watch our film and also addresses them as the familiarity to the concept of the product will be appealing.

Pace:

H

- quite long; dragged at beginning, however faster at end

M

- good to be slow to establish who actress is

- faster when drama started, worked well

We switched between two paces in our product through the different clips, and found it quite difficult to find the right balance in timing of cross dissolves and also how many cuts we would need to create the sense of drama we wanted to provide to our audience. We used a slow pace at the start to extend establishing shots of our main character and also for the audience to feel a false sense of security in the one scene, before we broke it with switching to the other scene in a harsher way to speed the opening sequence up appropriately.

We did have to tweak and 'correct' the scenes to really create that effect we wanted, and when first reviewed Henri commented saying it 'dragged', yet got faster at the end. We wanted to achieve audience interest and not lose them by the clip being too slow, so we sped up the cross dissolve transitions at the beginning and when we later asked Melissa she seemed satisfied with the mixture of pace we wanted to achieve and that the pace was parallel and correlated efficiently to the drama on screen; we had corrected and achieved what we desired to appeal to our audience.

Soundtrack:

H

- not thriller 'esque'

- too calm, detract from the piece

M

- needs ambient music to create eerie effect

We did have major problems trying to find a suitable soundtrack to match our piece, and we did switch what we had chosen a few times. We started with a track that was very slow paced and didn't work towards the end of the clip, where it was faster and didn't match. This created a problematic process of trying to find a soundtrack that could emphasize both of the qualities in pace and stay thrilling, and later we switched to separating the scenes further with two different tracks, a slow one at the beginning and a faster one at the end to enhance and dramatize the whole of the opening, and more so where it reached its climax in tension at the end. We also hadn't added in an off screen dialogue or any Foley's, which may have hindered our effect on the pace or chaos of the piece.

We listened to Henri and Melissa who together confirmed we needed something faster and much more ambient. Therefore we made sure to correlate the soundtrack to the drama, and to make the transition fluid in change of tracks we 'cut up' the opening with titles, where it cut to no sound. To make sure it wasn't calm we deliberately placed a crescendo at the end of the piece to add to the ultimatum of the opening sequence to leave a lasting effect on the audience and attract potential viewers to keep watching. Therefore to achieve an appealing soundtrack that worked with our clips we addressed the concerns voiced to make it much more attractive as a product to the target audience.

Age Rating:

H

- 12A

M

- 12A

Both Henri and Melissa estimated our product would be a 12A certificate, which is roughly where we set our work to be; at the 16-25 age market. This is still appropriate and works as the product is to attract a younger audience rather than an older one and both assessors said that they would recommend the film and would be something they would watch; which means we achieved engaging our target demographic, and as I believed is slightly more tuned to females watching as Melissa was generally more excited by it, saying it 'made her literally jump.'

Overall Opinion:

I feel that the filtering, pacing and soundtrack (once it had been reviewed and improved based on the comments made) has increased the attractiveness in our product to our target audience as it is engaging and full of faced paced thrilling action to entice potential viewers to stay on and watch the film based on the opening and also we accordingly addressed the needs of the audience by tweaking and improving the piece based on their comments.