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

Our Target Audiences are:

1. Fans of the Cyber-security action thriller genre (primary)
2. 15-24 year old males (secondary)
3. British audiences (Tertiary) 

I decided to the use uses and gratifications theory to help me analyse the way I address this audience. Here’s a slide to show how did this.

I feel that the use of high tech props, settings and scenes such as laptops, phones, CCTV, the Seward Studio, a hacking scene would have definitely appealed to our TA of fans of the Cyber-security genre. 

The action in our film i.e. the capture and chase scenes and the use of guns targeted fans of Action and Thriller. The capture scene at the end followed by a “24 hours earlier” was meant to be a surprise to the audience after a long built-up chase scene. 

Audience reactions:

We received the following feedback to our test shoot:

1. “The music’s too repetitive”
2. “The music doesn't suit the scenes”
3. “The surveillance shots work really well”
4. “What’s going on?”

Taking our feedback into consideration we added more shots to our story boards, altering things to make our opening sequence more understandable, tense, interesting and exciting. Shots included: More CCTV, running shots from more perspectives, hacking shots were more continuous and included elements of hacking and the train shots were altered to change the pace. Not only this but our editing style changed and we decided to do more breaks on action where we cut back and forth between the hacker and the organisation to add pace, suspense and make it overall more enjoyable. Our titles were also more interesting, connoting the hacking genre and we included fade to black and white for titles to change the pace and make the sequence flow as we desired.

After these alterations, we asked the public if they would watch the rest of the film and after asking 20 people we came up with the following results:

92% of people asked said they would continue to watch the film, where as the other 8% said it didn't really appeal to them as they found it boring. The people who answered 'no' fell outside the primary and secondary Target Audiences. This could be a reason why the opening didn't appeal to them.

The following are quotes of people who viewed the final edit of the opening sequence:              

                                                                                                                                                                

1. "It's really dramatic"
2. "The running shots have really good continuity"
3. "I like the way the shots are smooth"
4. "The cut from the CCTV into real life works really well"
5. "The '24 hours earlier' creates suspense"
6. "I like the police report at the end"
7. "It works really well"
8. "The music put me on edge"
9. "It went so fast"
10. "What happens next?"

Conclusion

To conclude I feel that our opening appeals to our desired TA. It is clear from our feedback that it is liked, and could be potentially successful as a film.  Although the opening sequence is very male centric, there would have been appeal to woman in the rest of the film as well as men. The opening contained a short piece of action to start the film but throughout the film there will be plenty of variety.