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

We hoped, with our film to create an entertaining, comical film, which our audience could in some way relate to. I have tried to explain how we tried to achieve this.


One of our points of focus for attracting our audience was Katz and Blumler's Uses and Gratifications Theory, from this we had several aims:

• inform viewers - parents, our secondary audience, look to be informed about the culture their child is interacting with, people are interested in teen culture, as we have seen with the widespread success of films and TV programmes like Skins and Mean Girls. Teens who don't immerse themselves in party and drug culture may also seek to understand this attitude to life
• we wanted our core and secondary younger audiences to identify with the events and characters involved, either the scene is the kind of experience they are used to, or they can understand and empathise with the reactions of different characters
• entertain the audience - not only should we have fascinating and identifiable themes, we wanted to create a quality opening that would actually be enjoyable to watch. To achieve this we used several techniques:
• Todorov's narrative theory: in our opening we created the equilibrium of the party and then disrupted it with the overdose, leaving the audience wondering about the consequences and how a new equilibrium would come about or what would happen next
• Continuity techiques: this created a seamless narrative so the audience could be immersed in the action, for example, even our sudden change of mood to the overdose montage, when the lights come on is transitioned with the matches on action of pressing the light switch and the stereo's power button
• Enigma: probably the most important narrative technique, we used this in several ways through the sequence
 
• 

  

  The first CU of Hannah seen: disturbingly large pupils

   for one with the slow reveal of Hannah's face, leading up to the dialogue which reveals she is overdosing,
• also at the point when Eve is leaving the party, the audience follows her, but are restricted from seeing her face till the very end, building up suspense. NOTE on this journey we also use ellipsis to stop the viewer getting bored and speeding up the action with no detriment to the shots
• we also drew on Roland Barthes' enigma code, leaving the audience with several questions about the sequence: 'did [Eve] cause the overdose? If so, why? Did [Hannah] die? How could this be resolved?'

Sub-genre: although the black comedy aspect of our film does not come across much in the opening sequence, it inspired our arguably most memorable final smiling shot which most of the enigma came from, it introduces the audiences to the notion of comical aspects and distinguishes it from other, more serious teen dramas, making it a successful USP for the film. Since the cult classic teen-oriented black comedy was released over 20 years ago, we thought it was time the genre hybrid made a comeback!

Eve's smile

escapism - our sequence allows the audience to entirely escape their everyday lives since it starts with a POV shot, immediately allowing them to immerse themselves in the action and allowing each viewer to assume a role in the film - as if they themselves are walking through this dreamlike party

a recorded interview with a 17 year old female and male, discussing their reactions to the final opening