5. How did you attract/address your audience?

We used gratification theory in order to try to attract/address our audience:

INFORMATION:

Our film informs our audience about serious issues, just as our influences have done (Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Struck By Lightning).

PERSONAL IDENTITY:

The audience is not alienated by our representations as they are as realistic as we could make them.
They are used to the UK setting, so may enjoy recognising the areas, or just seeing a London setting.

INTEGRATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION:

Our film causes the audience to empathise with Christopher, so would hopefully make mental illness less taboo, so people would not feel afraid to search for help.

Ideally, rather than making fun of people for habits like these, the audience will learn to understand people with OCD.

A summary of the way in which we want to appeal to the audience

ENTERTAINMENT:

We aimed to appeal to the audience by:

• Creating interesting characters, who they enjoy watching and following

• Having a love story as a form of escape for some of them, or reminiscence for the older audience

This shot of Naomi and Christopher walking off, with the fade, is meant to connote the beginning of their relationship. This would provide entertainment for the audience as they can relate to or aspire to it.

We also used enigma to entertain the audience and make them watch the rest of the movie, as they would want to know:
- Why does he have OCD?
- Will he get over it in the course of the film?
- Will they get together?
- Will something go wrong?

IN WHAT OTHER WAYS DID WE ATTRACT/ADDRESS OUR AUDIENCE?

Some of the ways we attracted/addressed our audience in our film opening are:

• Conformation to genre: the music is typical of the genre, similar to Struck By Lightning, therefore the attracts the audience and they can immediately identify the rom-com drama genre. Also, the use of the 'school-boy' character is conventional in films with our target audience, used in 'It's Kind of a Funny Story' and 'Perks of Being a Wallflower', so appeals to our audience.
• The editing pace is relatively slow, with pan transitions and long shot durations, meaning that it's quite a relaxing watch and that the audience do not have to pay excessive attention, they can easily watch the film opening. This is also conventional of our genre, 'Adam' using long shot durations during it's opening sequence to ease the audience into the film
  
• Titles: the titles do not distract the audience from what is going on, so appeal to them, making the film easier to watch by requiring less concentration
• During the journey sequence, we use wide and long shots to establish the UK setting in order to attract the UK audience. In the background of one of our shots, we have an iconographic red London-bus, connoting the setting and attracting the audience (see below)
  
• Close-ups and Mid-Close-ups during routine shots: Highlight the OCD element of our film for the audience, while also putting them alongside Christopher's daily life, building a relationship between them and Christopher.

AUDIENCE FEEDBACK:

When we asked people to fill out a survey after watching the film, it offered us some insight as to whether or not we were appealing to our target audience. 

One of our main fears was that either the audience would not understand that there were mental health issues portrayed in the opening, or that the sound quality would break their suspension of disbelief and make them dislike the film.

The picture to the right shows that our male:female ratio was about equal, so we've been relatively successful in ensuring appeal to both genders despite the genre.


The graph below also showed that 100 percent of the people we asked were from the UK, showing that we successfully targeted the UK audience.

This graph shows that our audience had a range, but were mainly 16 to 20 years old. This means that we can't be sure if our secondary audience of British families would have liked the film opening, as we only have one person above 20 who partook in our survey.

We asked the audience what they liked and disliked about our film opening, and if they would watch the rest of the film. Below are a few of the responses I found interesting, and that helped me to identify changes that could be made to improve the film opening.

I quite liked this response, as it pointed out the voice-over clarity, which I had previously thought was fine. Upon re-watching, I realised that the voice-over wasn't entirely clear, so this feedback helped me in judging my finished product, and that in future, checking this thoroughly is something that will need to be done.

I found this quite helpful as sound was something that we knew of, and proves to us that if we were to redo it, we would need to ensure better sound quality

18 out of the 19 people who did our survey said that they would want to watch the rest of the film, so we can deem that it would be mildly successful if that ratio is representative.

In hindsight, it would have been good to put an option to allow the one person who wouldn't watch it to tell us why. That way, we would know if it was because of our product, or their tastes.