How did you attract and address your audience?

We used the results from our questionnaire to determine who our target audience would be and what to include in our thriller to attract them. It was clear from our results that most of the feedback we received about the age of audience a thriller should be aimed at is 15-18 ‘there are traditionally scenes of violence and bad language’. The BBFC is the company that deals with the classification of film certificates, meaning any new film that has produced must classified by them before release.

BBFC Classification 15:

-          Drug taking may be shown but the film as a whole must not promote or encourage drug misuse. The misuse of easily accessible and highly dangerous substances (for example, aerosols or solvents) is unlikely to be acceptable

We kept this in mind when pitching our idea, we knew we couldn’t feature too much drug use/abuse but to achieve the right reaction from the audience, we didn’t need too. We only needed enough to show peer pressure in motion and the drug abuse itself.  using this information allowed us a wider scale of conventions we could include, for example nudity, violence, gore and drug use could all be used if we wanted, drug use being the idea we decided to incorporate.

‘The villain is usually a shady and mysterious character’ 

This is a fairly typical and conventional view towards villains within thrillers and horrors. It is widely used as it appeals to the audience as these characters traditionally bring a lot of dramatic tension and suspense. ‘The Joker’ is a character/villain from ‘The Dark Night’ played by Heath Ledger. The Joker is the Batman’s worst enemy, he isn’t a conventional criminal, he doesn’t look for money or power… all he cares about is destruction, playing with the basic physics of it all, what would this city do if I blew up a hospital? And the minds and lives of the people around him with no regard to life and death. This is something the batman has never seen or faced before which builds and develops into a strong connection between these two characters, the audience sees and experiences this connection drawing there attention, keeping them enticed in the film.

Conner played the role of John (Ryan’s friend) he appears calm, sensible yet worried when the mentioning of drugs accurse. The audience see clearly that this character does not want to participate, which implies that he is sensible and law abiding citizen. However as Ryan and James begin to push him to try it, using peer pressure and superior size to threaten him, he gives in and tries the drug. This scatters any good

Idea the audience may have felt towards him and like many others, he tries the new, unknown drug. At this point the drug has kicked in… the audience are unaware and confused as to wear these characters have gone and what they are doing. This was the perfect opportunity to show how quickly people can change and go from good, to bad, to worse. This unlikely, sensible little boy has taken this drug and the next thing the audience sees is him wielding a knife to another person’s neck, creating peaks of thrilling tension. A split personality, bloodlust, partial madness, all emotions we wanted this character to convey as we believed it would keep our audience enticed. When deciding what our thriller would be and what we wanted to include, it became apparent fairly quickly that it was going to be unconventional and unique. Despite this we believed a fresh new take on the thriller genre could be a great way to attract and receive a good response from our audience and that it was worth the risk. 

When asking about location and set most people opted for an unknown, eerie set location so we took this into consideration on deciding on a suitable location however we knew it didn’t matter to much considering thrillers can be set anywhere. Despite this our thriller was shot in a local area of the woods after attempts failed at filming at our original set location due to poor weather and transportation issues. We visited a remote location within the woods to minimise pedestrians and ensure that the thriller had a unique scene.

(Effects: Dream, High saturation)                                     (Effects: Vignette)    
       

We believed the location we had selected was ideal as it was remote, small and had a lot to offer the mis-en-scene. It is a unique location that we knew would appeal to the audience because of its aesthetic appearance.

We also edited a lot of shots; nearly all, using effects on the Apple Macs to provide more depth and feel to the scene. We used effects like ‘vignette’ and ‘Dream’ to emphasis the appeal for the audience, the shot above has been edited with ‘Dream’ as the effect. This shot was used to represent the boys vision and personal effects after the drug had been taken; heightened colours filmed using the camera effect ‘High saturation’ and then added the blurry curtain effect to frame the shot ‘dream’ to further emphasis the effect and the shot above is the result.

From posting this video on Facebook i got some very useful feedback, most of which was positive, here are the comments from the Video;

Alexia Martins good job, and nice effects ;)

Tinah Mummytobe Rye nice :P x

Kel Pinchin Good camera angles, nice effects. Multiple cuts in places really was effective. Nice confusing opening to a psychological thriller, will keep people watching to see what happens.

Emily 'Chubs' Dougall i like the variety of camera shots and effects, i also like the music as it works really well with the piece. i also think its a good plot and a good story to open a thriller with. To improve maybe do more with your titles? other than that its reaaaaaaaaaaaal good :)

Amy King Good variety of camera angles, and effects used... I like the birds-eye view shot, I think that works really well. Good start to a thriller, keeps people guessing and wanting to watch more to find out what happens

Callum James Cole It's good dude. Works really well.

Marc Bull Fryer That's Gd man

All of the comments above clearly show that our target audience recognises the effectiveness of the conventions that we used.

Filming in two time scales also attracted the interest of veiwers as it adds more to the storyline and adds hints of confusion. Another attarction was concept of a psychadelic thriller which is quite un-heard of  to many. Also the wide range of effects used in the product has a very enticing, attractive effect on the veiwer.