Q5. How did you attract/address your audience?

By including themes of death, victims and villains, and making the audience feel scared, we deliver a thrilling experience, which is what they expect. They will get so absorbed in the film that they will forget about their everyday life, which is the kind of entertainment they are looking for. We stuck to these conventions, because otherwise it would not really be recognised as a horror/thriller film. The audience in our screening found our film creepy and scary, and it made them consider internet safety, which is a massive issue in today’s world. In a separate blog post (“evaluation – more info”) I made a comparison between my film and “Suicide Club” (2002) which shares the theme of suicide.

We had to continually adjust our film to guarantee its appeal to our audience. We were originally going to use teenage male actors as our villains, however after several group meetings, and audience feedback, we decided that an audience wouldn’t be scared of teenage boys, so we used men. This is more conventional, and makes the villains more frightening and believable, which is what we are aiming for. We needed to clarify who the characters were in the opening sequence, because our on-going feedback contained some confusion as to who the characters were in the first few shots. They thought it was the girl logging in as “Julie” when really it was the men using their fake internet identity. We rectified this by repeating the shot of a whiskey glass and the keyboard with the man’s voice over the top, to reinforce that it was him logging in.

A shot that appealed to many members of our audience was where the camera is level with the keyboard in the men’s den, and there is a whiskey glass in the foreground. This creates enigma, and looks really good. I created this shot spontaneously, as we all liked the ‘level with keyboard’ shot in the girl’s bedroom. We made these similar shots very different by using different lighting and shooting them from opposite sides (the 180° rule).

For our screenings, we used a marketing mix, similar to what we would do if we made the rest of this film. We told people about it (word of mouth), put adverts in people’s registers (like magazine, posters etc), and created an event’s page on Facebook.

Feedback indicated that we did in fact attract our audience; we were rated between 7/10 – 10/10 for our opening sequence. Thanks to our clever branding and filming, our genre was extremely clear, and everyone who saw it recognised it as a horror, thriller, or a combination of the two. They all identified the themes, and the title stuck in their minds. One shot mentioned was the shot where the main villain’s face is reflected in the mirror, and he says “Haha, yeah that comes later darling”. Not only was it the composition that people liked, but also the line, because it was so creepy. When screening our film, everyone went “ooh” at that point, demonstrating that it creeped them out. A few people mentioned that our lighting could have been more dramatic, so that is something we could work on if we were to film the entire film.

The audience identified the characters successfully, however only half of them understood that Emma didn’t actually know “Julie”. One person suggested delaying showing the face of the villains, however we thought it better to show the villains’ faces as they affect the atmosphere of the film. 100% said they liked the sequence, and more than 95% said they would like to watch the rest of the film. They enjoyed the suspension of disbelief, keeping them gripped and wanting more. We guided them down a false path with misleading clues; a typical convention of horror/thrillers.