Evaluation Post 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

We addressed and attracted our audience by considering the uses and gratifications theory and meeting the audience's needs, and also through conforming to genre conventions with appropriate themes and characters. Please find below a mind map explaining this in more detail.

Please click present mode in the top right of the mind map for easier navigation.

Audience Feedback

In total I interviewed 8 people - 4 boys, 4 girls - in order to get feedback on our film opening and judge how successful we were off of that. Below are two interviews that I recorded so as to show you the interview process.

The individuals in these videos were all 16 or 17, and therefore represented one end of our target audience age group of 16-24 year olds. On top of this I also interviewed 2 males and 2 females who were all 21-23 years old so as to collect feedback from the other end of the spectrum. As you can see below, I have collated all the feedback we received into one document.

In conclusion, it seems we were very successful as the majority of the target audience sample said they would watch the entire film, therefore we have clearly met their needs. People particularly enjoyed the suspenseful atmosphere created by the music, the cliff-hanger and the low-key lighting and for the most part were able to directly link this to the horror/thriller genre. This is likely to be because we conformed to genre conventions so the audience could easily identify the genre, thus reinforcing the importance of us following genre conventions and also gratifying the audience's needs for escapism and entertainment as they can easily immerse themselves. Additionally, the consensus seemed to be that people had a lot of questions about what they watched that they wanted to ask, this gratifies their need for social interaction as they will likely discuss this with their friends.

There were some issues that some people highlighted such as unconvincing acting, however it was always a minority and it never seemed to drastically affect their enjoyment. Despite this, I do agree that particular actors were unconvincing and perhaps in the future we would be more thorough and selective with our casting choices. Thankfully, it seemed that those in our target audience sample who raised this point still felt that their need for entertainment had been gratified and therefore we were clearly successful in addressing and attracting the audience.

From a personal point of view, although no one raised this I felt in hindsight that 'Jean Smith' was not an appropriate or classic name for a young, British Muslim. This could potentially limit the appeal to the Muslim demographic as they may find it harder to identify with this character and so 'Jean Smith' may not gratify their needs for identifying with characters. In hindsight, I would do more research into potential character names and choose one more fitting of a young, British Muslim woman.