Question 5

Q5: How did you attract/address your audience?

To attract our audience we tried to make the intro as entertaining and polished-looking as possible.
We started off by creating a professional logo for our fictional production company, the logo is JJCM productions, and we used this as the letters represent the initials of the names of the people that participated in the media group that created the production.

 

The tone of the intro is set very early on in the production due to the presence of the fast moving train as the first shot to be shown.

 

The presence of this very fast paced shot so early in the production shows that the intro is going to be somewhat fast paced and due to the fact that the train shots are a recurring patters throughout the production this helps keep a sense of continuity. In addition to that, during the editing, we took off any music on these train shots and instead increased the diegetic sound to jar the audience when it came to those shots. Also we decided to increase the whiteness of these shots to make them stand out from the production and thus make them more memorable and increase the jarring effect for the audience.
 

 

The use of the close up in this shot, after seeing Connor walk up to the grave, gives a sense of claustrophobia as the audience is forced to get very close to the gravestone itself, this is mostly an uncomfortable experience for most people and that was the effect we were trying to recreate. Also the darker effect that we placed on the shots in the graveyard makes the tone darker, as well as helping convey the feeling of sorrow through to the audience.

This shot was taken by placing the camera on a dolly on wheels, this ensured that we could have a relatively stable shot while moving forward at the same time: this forward movement, coupled with the fact that the victim is turned away from the camera creates a sense of dread as the audience doesn’t know what is going to happen, it’s however clear that the result is going to be bad and possibly fatal.

  This shot is at the culmination of the chase sequence, when the audience’s attention is more focused after a series of actions shots, and depicts the assailant about to hit Annabelle with a rock.
The shots in this sequence have been edited together very fast in order to create a build-up of tension that will then decrease over the remainder of the intro as the victim is knocked out and therefore unable to prevent the subsequent events.
This shot hits home as it shows that the assailant has no remorse over what he is about to do, also the fact that the victim is powerless to do anything about it shows his dominance over her.

  This shot that follows immediately after the action sequence portrayed before shows the assailant demonstrating his superiority over the victim as he stands over her. The fact that the victim is passed out and tied down, combined with the very low positioning of the camera in relation to the actors increases this sentiment further.

At the end of the flashback and the production we return to the graveyard for a repetition of the first shot to really hammer the message home. These shots, differently from the ones used at the beginning, have been slowed down considerably to create an air of finality to the production and to reinforce the theme of death that runs as an undercurrent throughout the intro.

To understand what the audience wanted from our production we passed out a questionnaire that should reflect their preferences. We found out that our audience mainly watched thriller, comedy and horror films; as such we decided to apply some of these themes to the production. The comedic and horror elements are not present in the intro but, if we had time to finish the production, would have surfaced later in the film.

This is one of the questions we passed out, it shows that a large percentage of the questioned do not stream movies, however still is a healthy amount of people that do stream online. Due to this fact, had we finished the entire production we would have uploaded the production to one of the many streaming sites available: for example www.1channel.ch or www.10starmovies.com .

 When asked if the target audience wanted to see a film with death in it they unanimously said yes; consequently we decided to not only place death as a powerful undercurrent into the production but also to make the death you see in the intro very memorable and easy to distinguish from other productions.

 

 

Our target audience responded to this question in a way that tells us that we needed to make the plot more difficult to follow; however we were hampered by a severe time limit restriction so we couldn’t explore the various themes and ideas we had for a full blown film. However, as we wanted to make this intro as close to what our target audience wanted to see as possible, we decided to make the plot a little more obscure to follow than we could have: this is done by introducing the title (Kate’s Revenge) as a premonition that something bad is going to happen to the killer. To this extent we also used the voiceover that increases the amount of mystery surrounding the killing.

After the production was edited and burned onto disk we showed it to our target audience, the response we received has been overall good: he audience praised the return to the very beginning of film-making with the theme of death on the rail tracks, in addition to that they also liked the use of the voiceover that we used and the good use of context when using a poem that relates back to the title of the film.
However the audience identifies some key elements that act as a detriment to the overall production: namely the fact that in a couple of shots the tripod is clearly visible, or the use, throughout the beginning shots of a low quality camera that really brings down the quality of the whole production; however this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that we used a different high quality camera for the last, more important, shots.