5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Audience appeal was at the heart of our research, planning and production. We understood that our audiences' needs and gratifications should be constantly considered throughout the project in order to create a successful film opening. Our core audience was 16-24 year old males and our secondary audience 16-24 year old females. 

This slideshow demonstrates how we created our film opening in order to attract & address our Core and Secondary audiences:


We constructed our characters in order to appeal to our audiences in the same way that the films and programmes we focused on did. We wanted to create a protagonist similar to the character Freddie from Skins, who the audience would like and feel empathetic towards while relating to his issues. Some comments on a fan-made video of Freddie included 'I really like Freddie, he is sweet and a very nice person' and 'My favorite character from skins, definitely!'

Lucy was constructed in a more aspirational way; creating a character that girls would feel empathetic towards due to her trouble with Dan, but also someone who is strong and passionate, a quality that some girls would aspire to have. This is similar to the character Mini from Skins; she is a conventional teenage girl but can be strong and powerful when she needs to be.

More on the representation of our characters here

Music
After researching film openings, we realised that music was a very important part of construction. We researched music and soon found out that dubstep/drum&bass are becoming increasingly popular among the 16-24 year old audience. We wanted a song that would not only appeal to our audience, but also attract them by creating a sense of pace and drama. Here is the song that we chose:


I feel that our film opening attracted and addressed our audience incredibly well. However, there were a few things that could've been improved in order to increase audience appeal. For example:

• include more action in order to make it more exciting and appeal more to boys
• make the female less dominant as this could put male viewers off, and adheres to audiences' expectations
• emphasise the type character our protagonist is, for example by putting a focus on gangs, as he does not have a very clear characterisation

In addition to our core and secondary audiences, I feel that we could attract other audiences, for example:

• those who enjoy independent films/film-making
• fans of British drama in general
• those outside of the relatable audience group who want to be informed by the content
• those outside of the relatable audience group who want to experience escapism

In order to see how successfully we attracted and addressed our audience, we shared our video on Facebook and asked people to fill in a short feedback survey. Overall we received very positive feedback which showed a clear understanding of the story-line, intended audience and type of production.

Here is a selection of our positive audience feedback:


Here is some analysis of our audience feedback focusing on gender:

However, some of our audience didn't correctly pick up on the genre of our film, for example:

After analysing our audience feedback as a whole, I feel that we appealed to our two main audiences incredibly well. However, the confusion over genre implies that we should have included more conventions of the drama genre in order to portray this sufficiently, for example the use of mise-en-scene.