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

We attracted our audience of fans of psychological thrillers and 15-24 year olds by applying the Uses and Gratifications theory. The theory told us that audiences 'are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives' and that they use media to fulfil their own gratifications, typically one of the following four:

• Identity - ability to recognise product/setting/person or role models with similar values, someone you would aspire to be
• Educate - ability to acquire information, knowledge and understanding]
• Entertain - getting enjoyment and form of escapism from consumption
• Social Interaction - ability of product to produce topic of conversation between people and spark debates

Please see the mind map below to see how we applied the theory to our media product and opening sequence:

We also used continuity editing techniques in our opening sequence such as match on actions, as seen in the GIF below. Using these techniques increases the realism of our film and therefore makes it more likely to attract the audience.

Audience Reactions

Throughout the production and creation of our film opening, we keenly gathered feedback from our audience to inform ourselves whether we were appropriately addressing the audience and to find out what we could improve.

In our surveys, we aimed to take a random selection of gender and ages from within our target audience of 15-24 year olds, and in total we gathered a sample group of 8 people. We asked our sample group for feedback at two points: after our the rough cut of our test shoot and after the we finished our final edit.

Below is a chart of the feedback results we received from the reaction to our rough edit:

Although the reaction was not on the whole positive, we received extremely useful critiques for what to change and improve in our opening sequence. The main critiques were:

• Better characterization - despite the fact we intentionally did not use the actor we planned for in our test shoot, we did not use hair and make-up as well as we could have
• Different setting - the audience noticed that the small shooting location severely hindered us and how the narrative was communicated
• More obvious storyline - the initial storyline of Grace trying to emulate Ella was hard to get across to the audience and they didn't understand the relationship between the two characters

After we completed our final edit we asked the same questions to our sample group, and got the following results:

Looking at the charts, it's clear that the audience's reaction to our opening sequence massively improved as a result of the changes we made between the production of our rough cut and final edit. This tells us that we can safely say our attempts to attract the audience were in the end successful.