Evaluation: Question 5 - Attracting/Adressing Our Audience

Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?


Katz and Blumler's uses and gratifications theory states that audiences actively seek out specific media to satisfy needs such as escapism, and to empathise with characters. In order to satisfy these needs our sequence had to be realistic/convincing enough that audiences would be able to suspend their disbelief, and feel immersed in the narrative of 'Consequences'.






Music played quite a significant part in our opening sequence. Our choice of song ('The Siren' by Noize Index, shown above) and music genre was not only made to fit with our sequence in terms of titles, and creating pace, intensity and drama, but also due to audience appeal. Drum & Bass has great popularity among teenagers/young adults and is a modern, developing genre, much like many of the urban British films inspiring our idea. Below is a music reference point that I took inspiration from; Comprachicos from the band Pendulum. 0:50 to 1:20 being the part most directly inspiring what I believed would work well with our idea, aiming to create suspense, tension and enigma like I feel this song does.


 

Similar artists to Pendulum such as Netsky and Chase and Status are popular and current, all 3 of which have performed their music at Reading Festival, a festival largely aimed at and hugely popular with our 16-24 year old target audience.                 Reading Festival; example of a successful music festival popular with young people

Our characters addressed and attracted our audience too.

Below, Dan and Lucy are compared with important characters starring in popular media products also aimed at 16-24 year olds:

Alisha from Misfits (left) has qualities that inspired and were used in Lucy's character (right), such as independence and dominant personality. They both dress casually and have stylish hair, and can be seen wearing jewellery such as necklaces like above.

Freddie from Skins (left) shares with Dan (right) that he does not have a submissive personality but does show his emotions in times of distress. They also share difficulty in their relationships; Dan's with Lucy and Freddie's with Effy in Skins. They also both dress quite casually and have an athletic build.

To gain insight into audience response we created a survey on SurveyMonkey and posted it on Facebook, asking some people to watch our sequence and complete it. Relevant to this question is the response to our question about the audience

Age
-  Over 80% of those that answered (all of which, actually being from our target audience) could     tell it targeted their age group, with less than 20% seeing its appeal to younger audiences or     middle aged to older audiences.

Gender
-  A surprise was the balanced split between those seeing it targeted at male and female 
   audiences, with an equal majority overall answering both genders, however with a male core 
   audience we were expecting a more noticeable split; that more would acknowledge that 
   'Consequences' was targeted more at males than females.

-  This is not necessarily a negative response as we aimed to appeal to both genders, but we 
    possibly underestimated the appeal of certain aspects of our film, be it the actors, music or 
    genre, to females.

-  With only the free, basic SurveyMonkey account we could not identify what proportion of 
    females answering our survey answered other questions in a certain way but this might have 
    been interesting in identifying what particularly appealed to female members of the audience 
    or what aspects were seen to be targeting females. 

-   The two people mentioning music were 
    both male, however this statistic is too small to really be significant; we could have tried to 
    collect a greater amount of higher quality feedback



Below is another screenshot of audience feedback from the survey, this time from being asked what they thought went well:




We were happy to receive positive feedback from our opening sequence, particularly for the running part which took a lot of effort to shoot and edit, as well as to act in. The audience were anchored by the fast-paced cutting and enjoying the camerawork such as whip-pans and variety of shot types that interlinking with our chosen music track. Some particular examples of this are shown in the gif below.





Critical reception from our target audience was generally positive in terms of ratings as well, showing that they must have found our opening sequence quite appealing. Over 80% of those taking the survey rated our film 6 out of 10 or over, the most common rating being 7 at 33%. Two people rated the film 3 out of 10, which we may be able to assume is due to the acting, as it was the most common problem/improvement to make that our survey found.

In order to increase audience appeal:

• Have our male character be more assertive; the atypical emasculation of our protagonist by his dominant co-star is a convention that may not appeal as strongly as a strong male character - it is something they may not completely be used to
• Possibly focus on improving the acting so they can engage with the characters more (feedback shows some people questioning how good the acting was)
• Consider extending the running part of the sequence slightly, as it proved so popular

I believe we addressed and attracted our audience effectively through knowledge of stereotypes and conventions in many media products, as well as inviting them into the action through a combination of music, camera and editing. In other words we knew what our audience liked to see, and responded fairly well in terms of the opening sequence we created.