Holly Fairbairn

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

Contents
Introduction.........................................................2
Relatable characters............................................2
Enigma................................................................3
Conventions.........................................................4
Conclusion...........................................................5

Introduction
It is important for a producer to make their films
appealing to their target audience because it the
chosen members of the public are who the film is
aimed at so if the ideas dont appeal to the target
audience then the film wont be successful and it
means a lot of money was wasted on an
unsuccessful movie.
Different ways to attract your target audience
include characters, setting, costumes,
conventions, unique ideas, themes as well as
other aspects that an audience will take note of
when choosing a media product to watch.
Our target audience is mixed gender aged 15-23.

Relatable characters
One of the techniques we used was Relatable
Characters. All of our characters are the same
age as our target audience which will appeal to
them as the mannerisms, style and dialogue will
be recognisable as similar to the audiences own
personalities. I know from my AS Psychology that
people are more likely to recognise and chose
products staring their own aged actors. This is

called Own Age Bias which has been

psychologically proven by Anastasia and Rose.
We also incorporated situations spoken about in
the dialogue such as parties and alcohol which
are common to our target audience and would
make the characters more like our audience and
therefore more relatable so it would be more
likely for our product to appeal to our target
audience.
Our target audience didnt find the characters
themselves relatable but the talk about the part
appealed to them. To improve this I think we
could show more about the characters before the
incident so our target audience can relate to
them more.

Enigma
Another way we tried to appeal to our audience
is to use Barthes Enigma codes. Enigma means
mystery or puzzle, it is something that the
audience has to work out by themselves. The
theory states that the form of media portrays a
mystery to draw the audience in. This allows the
audience to ask questions and become involved
with the product. There are stages to the enigma
code and in our opening sequence we have
covered the first two. The Thematisation stage
where the question What in the narrative is an
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enigma? is posed. This is shown in the shot of

Siennas dead body and Ravens bloody hands.
The second stage we covered was Positioning
where there is a conformation of the enigma
which is shown when Siennas ghost comes to
haunt Raven.
By using enigma it gets the audience involved in
the narrative and by including the first two
stages it makes the audience want to watch the
rest of the film which is the purpose of the
opening sequence to grab the attention of the
audience and encourage them to watch and see
how the narrative plays out.
Our target audience liked the sense of enigma
because it was interesting and made them want
to watch the rest of the film to see what
happened next. This was our aim when including
the mystery in the narrative. As this is one of the
main themes it proves this aspect was successful
as it appealed to the target audience.

Conventions
The other method we used to attract our
audience was the use of conventions of the
Thriller genre. We decided to follow the
conventional themes such as murder,
supernatural and insanity which are three
common themes in thriller films. Another
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convention we followed was the traditional titles

that specify who was responsible for each aspect
of the production. Along with this we used
conventional music with piano tunes in the
background as well as some other gloomy
aspects.
The sense of familiarity will draw in our audience
as it is something that they already know and like
so they will be more likely to watch our
production if they know it is something that they
know or think they will like.
There were conventions that our target audience
picked up and recognised as elements of a
Thriller film but they also picked up on the unique
points of the narrative, because of this I would
say the use of conventions was a successful way
to attract our target audience.

Conclusion
I think these aspects were successful in
attracting our target audience as they enjoyed
the aspect of mystery and picked up on the
conventions to identify the production as a
thriller. They also found the situation of a party
relatable but not the characters. So I think we
were quite successful in attracting our audience.

If I were to do this again I would show more of

the characters before the incident so the target
audience could find them more relatable as well
as showing further character development.