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

When creating our opening sequence for 'The Right,' we had to consider various methods that would be effective in attracting our targeted audience and then engaging with them. Therefore, we thought this could be accomplished through the choice of actors, the plot and the soundtrack of our film that would both attract and address our audience.

Opening sequence: 'The Right'

Character Casting: 

Our actors are all young students around 17-18 years old like ourselves but playing more adult roles. We decided to take this approach to casting so that our targeted audience who are in the same age range as our actors, could relate to the characters in a conventional way and hopefully would want to get to know their back-stories. Another reason we went in this direction was so that our audience may want to aspire to be like some of the characters' roles, such as the detective. This was so that we could duplicate the effect of how people dream of how celebrated their life could be, such as that of the protagonist/action hero they have seen in a glorified film franchise. 

 

Actors: Pierce Thompson (l) & Myles Townsend (r)

Though our actors are teenaged students, we attempted to make them look older in suits, ties and coat. Consequently, we came up with framing the camera whenever possible to a mid or long shot to portray their clothing to get a sense of the characters' representations. For example, Pierce's character wears a formal suit and tie connoting that as an adult male, he is smart and business-like which is what one section of our audience want to strive towards in terms of careers. However, when it came to close ups (like the one below), our actors had to put on more serious facial expressions to counter-stereotype teenagers being casual and laid back about real life situations. 

Storyline/Plot: 

As part of our briefing to create a thriller opening sequence, and in keeping to the time limit of around 2 minutes, there was very little time to convey an interesting overall film plot which we would then have to condense. For that reason, we decided to take advantage of this by having a restricted narrative whereby information is withheld from the audience. An example of this, is that the assassin's identity is not revealed and the politician's (Meadows) death is unexplained. This creates an enigma and a sense of mystery that thriller audiences expect and thrive on in this type of film genre. From this, audiences can now interpret who the assassin might be since the one character we did portray frequently, was Franco (Myles). They are denoted to have some sort of narrative relationship between each other through cross cutting, specifically the dart scene where the final dart thrown by Franco is synchronised with Meadows' (Pierce) death. 

 

Franco throws darts whilst Meadows gets shot 

Clip from opening sequence making use of cross cutting as a typical code and convention of the thriller genre to create tension that attracts and addresses our 'thriller' specific audiences. 

Musical Score: 

This works similarly to the plot of the opening sequence in that it addresses thriller audiences through typical codes and conventions of the genre, but it supports the visual experience on screen. Our score contains elements of mystery and intrigue as well as tension and suspense to draw our audience in and evoke these types of feelings and emotions  by relating the music to the dramatic atmosphere of the film. 

This sound clip is from the track 'Final Curtain' which we used towards the end of our film as a dramatic finish as the title implies. In this piece of music, the mood is consistently tense and mimics the type of feeling you get when there is something at the back of your mind but you do not know quite what it is. This feeling of suspense is represented through certain points during the piece when the music reaches a high pitch and then back down again like a heartbeat that is building up to something. 

Below is a track from the science-fiction thriller film 'Inception' which inspired us when sourcing our own music which is why it is similar to our track above. It also follows the codes and conventions of the thriller genre by slowly but steadily building up tension until the plot climax.

This sound clip is from the track 'Oddly Astounding' which is used in the first half of the opening sequence. The tone is quizzical and mysterious which is meant to present the same types of feelings and reactions that the audience are undergoing as a result of being dropped into the middle of the story through non-linear editing.

To get a better understanding of what we as a group could do to improve our opening sequence, we uploaded it onto video sharing websites such as 'Facebook' and 'YouTube' to obtain audience opinions. 

 

'Facebook' & 'YouTube' layouts

This distribution led to constructive criticism which helped us in that we understood that we needed to change the audio levels, specifically referring to the actors' dialogue. As well as this, viewers were confused at the end of the sequence which is both good and bad. It is good in that this is what we wanted to accomplish - to create an enigma that audiences would want to watch more of the film to understand. Though, it might be too confusing to the point where people do not have a desire to watch more because they are not interested. This is similar to the film mentioned before, 'Inception' which had the reputation of befuddling audiences and viewing figures between who enjoyed that type of film and those who did not were split.