How did you attract/address your audience?

There were many times during our production of our opening film when we had to question whether we were addressing what a typical audience for a thriller film would be engaged by. We had to make sure we garnered interest from an audience by presenting a suspenseful opening film - this was one of the main things that we found from our (unfortunately lost) questionnaires. Audiences wanted there to be things left for them to figure out later on in the film while being given enough information to feel tense. 

We addressed this with the character of the teenage killer. We left any background of the character a mystery to the audience - so that they might feel interested and intrigued, wanting to know more about the radical character. However, we gave the audience the information that the teenage killer was wanting to find the man in the photograph, which might be possible by tracking down his friend 'Brian Greene' - introducing the enigma of whether these characters were to survive the rest of the film, and also of course who exactly the character in the photograph actually was. There is also the obvious element of the gun prop that the teenager threatens the mother cashier with, which was also supposed to bring tension to our opening sequence. 

Another way that we tried to address our audience was through the design of the antagonist. I tried many different combinations of costume with the teenager, from hooded jumpers to simple t-shirts in a bid to produce the most fearful reaction. I did this by presenting each combination (with it's own combination of make-up) to family and friends, asking if they believed my character to be a realistic killer. We settled on the design of a teenager wearing a smart dark shirt and smart trousers, with make up drawn around his eyes to make them darker and using lighting to emphasize sinister facial features. 

There were also times when we received feedback from our teacher and other students in our year through our blogs on a presentation we made about our opening sequence idea. One of the key bits of constructive criticism was whether the teenager would be believable as an assassin, as most assassins would be middle aged and full of experience. We therefore left this detail out of our opening sequence and instead willed audiences towards making their own assumptions about the teenager's background. The correct assumption would have been that he was kidnapped by a cartel after his parents were killed and raised as a psychopathic killer trusted to fulfill the dirty work. 

Yet another way in which we addressed a tension-hungry audience was with the character of the cashier's daughter - whose minimal role allows audiences to relate to the shop assistant and thus when the teenager draws the gun on her, makes the scene more suspenseful, as the audience would be wanting this character to survive the scene. 

There was also a time when I asked our actress of the shop cashier character what she thought of the opening sequence when we had just about finalized our plans for the scene and script, she replied with:

This prompted us to leave the script be, and go ahead with our plans as they were. 

One last way in which I addressed audience concerns was with the removal of one part of our opening sequence. At one point in the editing process, another group commented on how they thought that the original ending of our sequence (a scene in which another customer comes into the shop, intruding on the gunman and is left standing - visibly shocked and probably doomed to a death - before the scene cuts to black) was unnecessary and only took away from the original shock of the shooting. We addressed this by completely cutting this part of our opening sequence out during editing. 

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Our preliminary task took very long to complete - longer than it should have - due to poor organisational skills within our group. It was difficult organizing the location to be free for us to film and at one point we had our filming completed and editing complete before the final cut express program failed to save our project. We then decided to make a new script from scratch and chose a new location for filming, and we managed to complete it and edit it together within a day.

The poor organisational skills and the consequences of this drove us to construct a schedule for our opening sequence task, so that we all knew the dates and times for what we wanted to do. In this sense, I learnt that organisational skills are key from my preliminary task.

The preliminary task was good practice for script-writing, helping us in our later construction of what we believed to be realistically flowing conversations and actions. However, the script was weak in formatting as we had not yet learnt the formatting skills for making scripts from our course. In our opening sequence, I wrote many drafts for a script, until it was formatted like an actual script and until it represented the narrative we wanted to tell in our opening sequence. Despite this, our opening sequence did not necessarily follow each and every element of our script, and we completely removed the end, where another customer intrudes on the scene.

In our preliminary task, I was on the role of a cameraman and a director and played a key role at editing, although in earlier attempts at the preliminary task I was just an actor. These tasks helped me to develop my skills in all of these areas, which I used heavily (barring camera, which was very minimal) in our actual opening sequence, as an actor, heavily involved with directing, and a key editing role. It helped me to piece together dialogue from different takes to form one scene which kept the free flowing dialogue as if I hadn't edited it at all. On watching my preliminary task, it also helped with editing because I spotted some continuity issues such as lights being on or off, or the actors being positioned in slightly different ways in one shot after another. It also obviously helped immensely with directing actors and the camera woman (Phoebe) in many shots as I was able to work out what looked right and what didn't look right.

The sound issues in our preliminary task were obvious, with volume levels rising erratically from one shot to another in a way that sounded unrealistic and abrupt. For our opening sequence, we chose to edit on an overlapping sound clip of traffic, which was captured in the shop itself while we were there. This helped in keeping a natural flow to our sequence so that other cuts in sound were less noticeable to the audience. We also used other methods to disguise such obvious problems, such as using a loud eerie soundtrack and overlapping it onto our scene, drawing the audience's attention away from the sound of traffic.

In both tasks I have learnt directing, camera, editing, sound and even acting skills. I was involved heavily with each of these aspects in our opening film and skills like being able to direct actors effectively, make editing as subtle as possible and having good cinematography skills will help enormously with future filmed projects.

Evaluation: Who would be the audience for your media product?