How did you attract/address your audience?

Our initial aim was to produce an original piece that not many audiences are used to watching. We thought about many possible ideas which finally lead to the “buried alive” concept. We asked people we knew were interested in films and asked them how many films with this plot they’ve seen, and the answer was very little. Once we were sure with the idea we had to do some research and so together we watched Buried starring Ryan Reynolds. We learnt by watching this film that it was full of action even though Ryan’s character was stuck in the coffin for the majority of the film. However, the point of our project was to create a thriller and we needed to think about how we could “thrill” an audience with a story like this. If this movie were to be a full length feature, we agreed that there would be some jumpy moments and frequent moments that may seem frightening. For the amount of time we had in this project, we didn’t get to incorporate all our big ideas but we did deliver on leading up to these frightening moments as we were given such answers through our post-production questionnaire. Whilst filming we constantly had to think about how the audience would react to each scene they would be shown. Our most effective scenes were Sophie in the coffin, screaming and struggling. They were so effective because the screaming was able to frighten and frustrate the audience to the point where they were scared. The editing consisted of a lot of fade transitions but it didn’t seem to disrupt the effect we aimed to achieve with the audience. We had made no creative decisions that were drastic or that were changing the original plan because we ourselves had responded the same way the presented audience did during the screening a long time before. According to the results of the questionnaire, the levels of interpretation were pretty clear even for the viewers who weren’t 15 during this screening.The audience responded positively during the screening, which came to our surprise because we were very sceptical beforehand. Obviously we did get negative comments but they weren’t harsh and they were very helpful. The majority of comments however were positive and were all the thoughts that we had during the planning of the plot itself. The screening did lack population validity however because we showed it to one culture. There’s potential that if we had shown this task to a more multicultural audience we may have gotten a different response.