Question 5

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

To start with we produced a questionairre for our target audience so that we knew what sort of things made them watch Horror films.This helped us decide on what to include in our production. The questions we asked were clear and although there were fewer questions compared to other questionairres, we believed that it gave us enough information to generate an effective product that would attract the target audience. Before we did the questionairre we looked at the target audience research by The UK Film Council (as seen in question 4). The reason we looked at the target audience was so that we knew what sort of people to interview and question. We needed to consider age, class and gender to ensure we appealed to the target audience.

We asked 4 questions that were deliberatly asked as open to get fair, detailed and qualitative results:

Question 1 was, 'Do you enjoy watching Horror films?' The feedback we got was positive from both the male and the female. This was good because the target audience we had looked at previously was correct about the gender and age because they were the first 2 people we asked and we knew that this meant  that we would defiantaly aim our production at males from the age of 18 and females below the age of 35.

Question 2 was, 'Why do you enjoy watching Horror films?' The response we got for this question was that the male enjoyed watching something other than tv and the female liked to snuggle up and feel safe. This showed us that we should have a fear factor and a jump factor because people like to snuggle up and feel safe. The males feedback was good because we knew that people do not like to be bored therefore will watch Horror films to keep their mind occupied because Horror films allow the audience to wonder who the killer is.

Question 3 was, 'Whats your favourite Horror film and why?' We had two different answers in this question the males was The Ring because it had the fear factor and with that came dislike but by the end i grew to like it. By this response we were certain that the product had to have a fear factor for two reasons the response to that answer and the response by the female in question 2. The female said Saw because it was had gore and it made her feel safe when the people nearly get free. So by the womans response we knew we needed some teasers for the audience so further on in the production the woman may try to escape and therefore the audience will feel like 'yes she is escaping' and then he catches her again.

Question 4 was, 'Whats your favourite sub- genre of a Horror?' Both the questiones said psychological Horror because it makes there mind work because of the enigma's created, so we have incorporated that into our production having it being silent and with no diaglogue, with the hitting and the cellar it makes the audience think about what has happened and creates enigma's that must be answered.

An example of a Psychological Horror film is Lake Dead:

While we did the questionairre we noticed that the best selling film of that period which was the last quarter of 2011 (october to december)  was a horror so we knew we had the right film genre, the best selling film in the last quarter in 2011 was paranormal activity 3. The correct target audience and the right research before we started to film our production.

All the research mentioned above helped us with the use of shots we used the lighting used and the editing we had chosen to use because they all make the points I made above. For example the fear factor and the slow editing helps with that because if the editing is slow then it will create suspense and the audience will have their heart rate raised in anticipation of an event. When we were filming we took the target audience questionairre and we made sure our shots met the needs of the target audience because then if the audience is happy they will stay and watch the whole production. We attracted our audience by using the shots they wanted there and using conventions they like to see in other horror films. For example the shot of the hammer being raised is very similar to Psycho because it is a point of view shot of the woman seeing the hammer come down to her and in Psycho we see a very similar shot and that worked on the audience of that film. All together we have addressed and attracted our audience by using shots they know about and would expect to see in the horror genre. For example we stuck to conventions of young attractive actors the age of them and the style of clothing they are wearing all of these attract and address the audience because it works in alot of Horror films so why change the conventions of them.

We would promote our production on websites such as Facebook because it is a very easy form of word of mouth, Youtube because then people can see a snipet of our production therefore tempting them to watch it and websites such as www.firstlightmovies.com because it is websites like that, that will help a new movie launch into the film industry and from there it will hit the multiplex cinemas faster.