Question 5 - Thriller Evaluation

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

In order to gain an effective feedback for our thriller opening; The Pursuit, I decided to hand out questionnaires to people after they had watched the film. This meant that I had to something to refer back to and I had a real source of feedback. Our audience demographic is 16 - 18 year old white British males. This is because all of our characters in The Pursuit are of this ethnicity.  I decided it would be best to ask both females and males in this age group to watch the film and then answer the questions afterwards because it would give a fair representation of the audience that found the film most appealing and why, this was a useful thing to do as it allowed me understand exactly what the demographic identified with when watching The Pursuit. It was vital to gain feedback from males as they were our target audience therefore i chose to gather questionnaires from 2 males and 1 female, all three being between the age of 16 - 18. Images of these questionnaires are shown below. On purpose I got questionnaires off participants who were fully ranged between 16 - 18 years old. One being 16, the other 17 and the other 18, this way I was able to gain feedback from the complete target demographic not just people that are of my own age.

This questionnaire was completed by a 17 year old female, fellow AS level Media Studies student. I chose to give a questionnaire to a female to see if it also appealed to that gender as it is a male dominated film. 

Questionnaire completed by a 16 year old male. 

Questionnaire completed by an 18 year old male. 

When evaluating the answers I had given to me, I find found they were mainly positive with only a one or two negative points. This shows that The Pursuit was well received by the audience. The Pursuit had a circular narrative which is a more complex and complicated narrative structure, our circular narrative included the flashback that Tobias had. We wanted to create a slight sense of confusion within the audience and wanted to engage their brains so they had something to think about making the story line more complex and intriguing. This was successful as no one rated understanding the narrative as 5, they rated it as two 3s and one 4. Despite our circular narrative the audience were still able to hold their attention on the sequence therefore this shows me that the narrative wasn't too circular and the audience were still able to follow what was going on. On two occasions the participants who filled in the questionnaires put that they found it difficult to understand who the murderer was, this was pleasing as we wanted to create confusion about who the murderer was throughout further portrayed through the characters enigmas. However next time to improve we could make it clearer about who the murderer was in order to create a story line that is easy for the audience to follow. One negative point was that we should "render character walking up stairs", this is when we have a close up of Tobias' feet and there is a pause and it immediately skips to the next scene, this was a technical fault, to improve we should have rendered that particular shot in order to keep flow and movement and to stop the film lagging. 

One aspect of our thriller film that was rated highly was the camera work and editing. Two of the participants rated this section a 4 and one a 5. This shows that the way we shot and edited our film made it more attractive to view and more intriguing to watch. We would have liked to of use a more high quality camera which would have allowed us to shoot in 1080p HD form but unfortunately this resource was not available to us. We had to use a camera provided to us from school which couldn't of given us as clearer or crisp picture as a HD camera would have but regardless we used a wide range of camera shots/angles to appeal. This was emphasised in the section where the participants answered what were the best features of the production and in all occasions camera work was circled and on two occasions editing was. This clearly shows that our editing and camera work played a big part in attracting the audience. We tried to keep the editing quick and snappy to keep the audience engaged and a vast majority of camera angles/shots to give variety to our audience and so that it didn't become repetitive and boring. 

An over the shoulder shot just one example of the many camera shots we used. 

Another successful element of the mise en scene that the audience felt was engaging was the soundtrack that was used alongside the action. I made to sure to research and listen to the type of soundtracks that had been used in our thriller films such as Kidulthood. When talking further to some of these participants about our soundtrack they had said that it helped to build tension gradually as the film went on and also helped to set to set the pace for the action. It was particularly good at creating sudden moments of tension and suspense due to its vast rise in tone such as the moment when the title for our film appears on screen. When the participants were asked whether the soundtrack effectively reflected and enhanced the mood & action, all three said yes. 

The audience may have been attracted through the way that the characters costumes reflected much of what the youths of today are seen to be wearing. This may have enabled the audience to identify with the characters more due to their similar attire. For the characters of Holly and Harry we took slight inspiration from the films 'Ill Manors' and 'Kidulthood' as these are gritty British thrillers and was able to capture the sort of social class that may be attracted to our film. Tobias' costume was based around a typical teenager, as in a fairly scruffy look that hasn't taken much effort to arrange. This creates a sense of confusion as Toby is the character that looks least threatening yet is arguably the most dangerous character. The target audience should have been able to identify with all three of the characters as they are British males aged between 16 - 18; therefore all three characters represent the target demographic we were trying to reach in The Pursuit. 

Our cliffhanger acts as a hook for the rest of the film. The audience see a hand appear on Toby's shoulder and are left wondering whos it is and also another shot of Toby at the end leaving the audience wondering if Tobias was infact the murderer. We used a cliffhanger to ensure the audience wouldn't lose interest in the action and would want to continue to watch the rest of the film. This also helped to provide many unanswered questions and a burning desire to know where the plot goes next. 

Overall the participants rated The Pursuit an 8/10, clearly showing that the film was able to attract our target demographic that we had originally targeted through the use of certain generic conventions such as location, soundtrack, camera angles/shot types and character.