How did you attract/address your audience?

Sandy Lee, one of the
participants in the interview.

To attract and address my audience, I initially asked them what they wanted. In an earlier blog, I posted the results of a series of interviews. We asked people that would be the potential audience for the film what they wanted to see from a crime thriller film. The response was very uniform, with most people stating that they would expect to see a complex and tense storyline, chases, guns, fight scenes and plot twists. With this knowledge in hand we knew exactly what we had to do to create a film that would appeal to the target audience. There was also a couple of things that the interviewees asked for such as car chases and gadgets but we ruled out these for the final product for a number of reasons, such as time constraints and overly complicating the production.

One of the interviewees, Jacob Stevenson, said he wanted to see "massive forest and a quiet forest." To address this, we decided film in a field in Clavering which had a wood surrounding it. This setting was not that typical of a thriller, usually in a city or a built up area. However we thought that this setting fit with the narrative of our film, with the main protagonist being on the run from an anonymous agency, pushed out of his usual way of life and forced to flee to the most remote places in the country. This also attracts the audience because it adds something new to the crime thriller genre, not the normal setting of a city. The opening shot also denotes a house in the background and a public footpath in the foreground connoting that the setting is actually very close to the people watching the film which relates to them, making them feel that they are more involved with the film. 

Opening shot with the house
in the background.

When we set out to make a chase scene, we wanted to make it look as fast as possible. To do this we used a lot of shots that lasted less than a section to build up speed right at the start as the agent makes his presence known to the protagonist. Doing this keeps the audience interested in the film with the fast start and then settling into a moderate pace of shots with low angle shots of the characters running to keep the pace up and then stopping everything together when the agent pulls out his gun. This changes the situation and stops the chase from dragging on, keeping the audience still engaged. We repeat this until the agent catches the protagonist, adding in different shots such as extreme long shots, medium and side on shots.

I attracted audience by using actors of similar age of the target audience. Xiangyu Ge who is 16 who plays the agent and Ed Brooker who is 17 who played the protagonist. The actual age of the characters is actually supposed to be around 20-25, for both the protagonist and the antagonist in this scene. This would also then appeal to the rest of the majority of the target audience.