R & P Post 5: How we plan to attract/address our target audience

We plan on appealing to our main target audiences in a number of ways. This ranges from props and mise-en-scene to the film's content and certification. Our core target audiences are 15-24 year old men & women and fans of the thriller/psychological thriller genres. One way of attracting the 15-24 year old audience is through the film's 15 certification, as this will make the lower end of our target audience clear, whilst also including enough violence and mature content to justify the rating, so as not to alienate the audience. The main characters themselves will be aged around 18, connoted through the film's dialogue and their social media profiles. This will, therefore, also appeal to the target audience of 15-24 year olds due to the characters' relative relatability age-wise and with their daily routines.

Moreover, this extensive use of social media and technology within the film will also draw on the idea of relating to 15-24 year olds, as this section of the audience tend to be the most familiar and the most active users of social media. As a result, we drew inspiration from Unfriended and Cyberbully, which also heavily use social media and technology, to inspire our own shots which include social media and our content, as both these films also have 15 ratings.

Unfriended is a film which also uses social media,
and has a similar certification to our own film.

We aimed to draw on social media as a
 main tool to attract our target
 audience of 15-24 year-olds.

We want to include a variation of
shot types for effect - from closer, more
claustrophobic shots to longer shots
with voyeuristic connotations.

The main method of targeting the audience of thriller fans will be through our variation of framing for effect. For instance, we will use a majority of tightly-framed CU and XCU shots in the first half of our opening sequence not simply for practicality's sake in the relatively confined setting of a bedroom, but primarily to immediately position the audience within the room and evoke a feeling of claustrophobia and entrapment. We will then combine this with longer XLS shots when the antagonist moves across the room to create a CCTV-esque, perhaps almost voyeuristic feeling. As well as this, we will refrain from revealing the identity of the stalker until mid-way through the sequence, to keep it mysterious and heighten the audience's interest. This is similar to TV series Dexter, in which the opening credits don't reveal the main character's face until towards the end. Furthermore, we aim to quickly create a sense of unease through our opening sequence's visual look through its grading and mise-en-scene by lowering its hue and brightness and including unusual objects such as latex gloves and coloured contact lenses to clearly indicate this. We were inspired to adjust our grading in this way after watching other student films, particularly 'Excemption', in which the grading is used to increase tension and to add a mysterious side to the film. This could also potentially interest our secondary audience of horror film fans, as both are also often used in films of this genre - an example being The Woman In Black.

The Woman in Black provided inspiration
for both grading and mise-en-scene.