Thursday, March 22, 2012

Evaluation Question 5 - How Do You Attract/Address Your Audience?

How Do You Attract/Address Your Audience?

Firstly, we attempted to attract our audience by the use of characters. Jodi plays the scream queen in the film. She is represented as a sexually active, popular, attractive girl who is sexually active. The scream queen character is often admired by males, which is part of the "male gaze" theory. Also, a female audience may find Jodi appealing as she could possibly be an inspiration to their appearance. Luke, who plays a jock like character named "Damien" in the film may attract the potential audience as, in the film, he is portrayed as a good looking, athletic, humorous type of character in which the audience may be able to relate to, or for females, be attracted to. Both of the characters are around the same age group as our primary target audience, which is one way in which we have addressed our audience. The dialogue in which the characters use are appropriate for a teenage audience, in which they can relate to. For example, at one point "Damien" says "Babe".
We have attempted to address our audience by their costume, for example, Jodi is wearing leggings and a pink top, which may be typical of a teenage girl to wear. Also, Damien wears jogging bottoms, a jumper and a snapback hat, all which are "trendy" for modern day youths.


Another way in which we attempted to attract the audience, was by keeping the killer's identity a secret until the very end of the opening. This way, we were using narrative enigma, yet we were adding hints at various bits of the opening, for example showing the hair off the doll coming through the door. This added suspense to the opening as the audience were given hints about this strange figure.


 
We hope that our film will attract an audience, due to previous success in films which can relate to Tiny Terror, such as Childs Play (1988), which had a budget of $9 Million, and as of March 1989, made around $33 Million in the USA only. Also, other evidence of this is Scream (1996), which had a budget of $15 Million and as of July 1997made $103 Million in the USA and £8.2 Million in the UK.

In order to attract our audience, Barncasarn needed to produce what the audience WANTED. So feedback was very important for us. Here is an example of some feedback we got about a rough cut involving the bathroom scene with the doll.



In this, Dillon says "When it first came in, it looked real, it looked scary, but the way it was handled didnt work because both of its feet came off the floor"

So when we re shot another rough cut of tiny terror, we made sure we changed the shot types of the doll. Here is the rough cut we made after receiving the previous feedback:


I also made links to the Tiny Terror rough cuts on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to gain more knowledge of what the potential audience may want to see in Tiny Terror, what they thought worked well, and what they thought did not work so well. I found that promoting Tiny Terror on social networking sites was very useful in order to gain feedback and allow the potential audience to become interested in Tiny Terror, already forming a fan base.













Also, the 'scare factor' of the doll was very important to us, as the doll was the biggest part of the opening. We made sure that the doll was scary physically by adding modifications, which are stated in this blog post: Killer Doll - Modifications Made

Barncasarn advertised our videos on youtube, this is my youtube channel: georgiabarningham, which has various videos from throughout the filming process, also, these videos are on the IGSMEDIASTUDIES youtube account, which attracts a large audience and has over 21 Thousand video views.
 As we promoted Tiny Terror on social networking sites to receive more of an audience. This worked well, as one week, were were in the top 3 of most viewed videos.

We attempted to appeal to our potential audience by creating a company blog: Barncasarn, which regularly posted blogs about what the company was doing, what stage of production we were with the opening, how the filming was going, what changes we may have made, information on the location, the whole editing process and how we have grown from using different ideas and then testing them etc so throughout the whole process, they were kept up to date with the construction of Tiny Terror. The Barncasarn blog holds most of the updates to the filming of Tiny Terror, the roughcuts, the vodcasts and podcasts and the call sheets etc to show our potential audience what changes we were making in order to better our product and show that we were listening to the feedback. Barncasarn feel that a blog was the best way to update our potential audience regularly on what was happening in terms of the production of Tiny Terror, so they could feel more involved in the final product.



A way to try and appeal to our audience was by using intertextual reference. At the beginning of Tiny Terror, Barncasarn used a false scare. When the girl turned around, she said "Damien you little devil!", this is intertextual reference from The Omen (directed by Richard Donnor 1976). We thought that this would be a good intertextual reference to use, because with the false scare, we used narrative enigma in that we did not show the boy until he scared his girlfriend, so he could have been a dangerous figure, the way she says "little devil" suggests that she is joking, however this could have been ironic as before revealing identity, the audience may have thought that he was infact a dangerous character.

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