2. Following on from question four we had to find out about our target audience, so we decided to create a questionnaire that
we could use to ask the public their age, gender and which genre they most enjoy to determine who our film was going to
mainly be for. I then put this data into a bar chart using Microsoft Excel, the results showed that the age group that enjoyed
the horror genre most were the people ages 15-20 and also mainly males. This helped us decipher which age groups
enjoyed which genre, and therefore helped us to decide that we were going to use an age rating of a 15 because this was a
popular audience type and so we could het the best results from the film. The age group 15-20 also seemed to like the
thriller genre and this may be because they are quite similar and as a result of this, we decided to involve aspects of a
thriller within our opening sequence to really engage our audience type and our target audience to our opening sequence.
Once we decided that our genre was horror we came to the conclusion that most of the audience are going to also be
interested in other movies which entail the horror genre, for example Sinister, Paranormal activity ect. This lead to the
decision that we needed to do some research into films like this so that we were able to understand the processes used to
make this film such as the type of shots which are used, sound, mise en scene so we can understand the style used in
horror films.
Most of the films use conventions such as mise en scene to portray the antagonist and protagonist and this helps the
audience feel intrigued in the narrative. They use props and costumes to help establish their social class and also the
person they wish to portray e.g. in our opening sequence we used a knife to show the little boy as evil. Because we had
analysed other horror films, we were able to easily incorporate the ideas into our own film and hopefully attract the right
target audience.
Through other things including sound, having researched other horror movies it became clear that the score was an
incredibly important part of making the scenes seem more scary as it created a tense atmosphere. We incorporated the use
of the score into our music when it became clear to the audience that the child was possessed, and in the 2 weeks before
the happy scene music was playing to tell the audience that this was a happy time in the child's life, the music used in that
scene helped to show the relationship between the mother and child as it made them seem very close and happy.
3. Our questionnaire and
results
We asked our
audience directly and
really took on the
views and opinions
they had to make our
opening sequence as
attractive to them as
possible.
