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

For evaluation five both myself and Khushel decided that we would do something creative for this particular evaluation task and show off our skills by filming our peers and teachers answering a variety of questions based upon our thriller opening sequence ‘Premonition.’ We believed that by creating this video we would be provided with a much better, in depth profile of what our peers thought of our film and what improvements could be made in order to make it a successful thriller. What is more, is that by filming and editing the footage we were able to take scenes out from our own thriller opening sequence and by ‘wire framing’ the footage we could incorporate segments of it and fit it into the evaluation video where people began to  comment on specific examples from our film. By doing this, our audience would be provided with a clearer, understandable view of areas which shone out to our viewers and those which captured their hearts.

When it came to choosing a selection of people who would appear in our evaluation video, we decided that we would choose people who reflected our target audience, this being citizens aged 15+. We included a variety of college students and two teachers, one who is in their late 20s and one who is in their 40s into our evaluation task so that we would be provided with information and opinions from people who come from different ethnicity backgrounds and are different ages. Moreover, considering the fact that we did not create a film poster to promote and advertise our film to our target audience we decided to use other strategies to attract our audience, these being that we could send our DVD release of our thriller film to a variety of television companies for them to preview on their film review shows such as the BBC’s ‘Film 2011’ hosted by Claudia Winkleman, London Tonight and This Morning where film critics could review the film and explain to the audience’s their thoughts and opinions upon the film and whether it is a successful thriller. By allowing film critics to review the film on live TV, viewers will become interested in the film and will then decide to either research into the film by visiting official websites to read plot synopsis and watching trailers of the film before ordering and buying the film when it’s released in UK stores.





When filming our fellow peers and teachers for our evaluation video the majority of them answered the questions correctly providing us with positive, optimistic answers that we had originally wanted to hear from our target audience.

We asked our target audience, ‘Whether they believed our film was successful as an opening sequence.’ The older teacher out of the two answered saying “Absolutely, it sets out the whole tone of what you can expect, whether it’s a trailer or a clip you saw before hand.” This was a very encouraging comment for us to hear for the reason that it enabled us to realise that not only had our opening sequence interested and drawn in our younger audiences but it also branched out to our older audiences as they found it entertaining and dark.

Another question we asked was, ‘What are the successful features of conveying the genre of a thriller film?’ One of our fellow peers answered saying “It was when you were in the bed and you were moving around that was successful because it presents psychiatric behaviour.” On one hand, the youngest teacher out of the two claimed that “The music definitely and I thought that the set decoration was quite apt as well. It looked sleek and the colours were quite dark, you could tell it was meant to be a psychological thriller.” On the other hand, the older teacher out of the two explained that “The clipping back from the actual real, the character waking up, talking to a potential boyfriend and then the vision in her head that she’s already dreaming.” The evidence that we gained from our audience’s answers was that both the student and the youngest teacher spoke more about the scenes in the film and the successful features which enabled the film to become a successful psychological thriller. Whilst, the older teacher did sometimes speak about a couple of scenes from the film but mainly focused on the dreaming side of the narrative rather than the impact it had on allowing it to become a successful thriller film. Perhaps this is to do with audience’s age difference or whether they prefer to watch and observe different aspects of the film compared to one another.

As a group, we wanted to find out whether, ‘The soundtrack fit the storyline and genre of the film’ so we asked our target audience what their thoughts and ideas were upon this subject. We asked only the students for their opinion on this question and they provided us with both positive and negative feedback explaining that:

• “Yes it made it creepy.”
• “Yes the suspense throughout the movie lead up to that moment so it really did.”
• “Personally I don’t think it did, it didn’t have enough tension. I think it was good but it could have changed later on. I think that it could have started one way and as the tension built up, the music could have become tenser as it went along.”
• “It was intense but dreamy which went with the whole dreaming idea.”

Clearly, from the student’s answers the majority of them believed that the soundtrack was appropriate and fit into the psychological thriller exceptionally well as the melody delivered a dark, eerie, tense, atmospheric sound. However, one of the students believed that whilst the soundtrack was good and interesting, he thought that it could have started one way and perhaps the tempo or frequency of the melody could change to a different format so that it allowed more tension and anxiousness to build up throughout the opening sequence.

The final question we asked our target audience was that, ‘Did they understand the film.’ We questioned the youngest teacher out of the two and one of the students so that we could identify their answers and see whether there was any differences in their response. The teacher explained that “Yes, I basically think that it was a girl who was dreaming and she had a premonition that she was going to be killed by her partner.” Whilst the student claimed that “Yes, the title of the film helped it and helped you understand the film a lot more.” From both of these responses, it became noticeable that they both understood the narrative of our thriller opening sequence. Additionally, the fact that our title had such a bold meaning to it, our audience knew instantly when watching our opening sequence what the remainder of the film would consist of.

All in all, we took on board both the positive and the negative feedback we gained from our audience research and if we were ever able to re-shoot or make changes to our thriller opening sequence we would have definitely made sure that we met the needs of our target audience.