Thriller opening

Thursday 21 March 2013

Evaluation-Part 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

I was going to do annotate my video on Youtube to answer this but after having problems with it I have chosen to write it out.

I asked six people to watch my video and then followed it up with some questions about what they just watched. The six people were between sixteen and thirty, they had all lived around Harrow recently. Two of the participants are in college, another at university in Plymouth  two working in London and one in Albania doing missionary work. I chose these people because it gives me a variety of ages as well as them having very different backgrounds.

The first question asked was if there was any part of the thriller opening that would not be suitable to younger audiences? and if yes what age is too young? The missionary worker said "the whole opening gave an eerie feel that would not be suitable to those of fifteen and younger." The university student said "they[younger viewers] would not be interested in it due to it being in black and white" I thought this was quite interesting and went along with what I had originally thought when giving it a certificate of 15.

Another question asked was, did the music work with the opening? if so how? The older college student(age 18) said "the music was the best part because it went in time with the footage and really enhances the feel of the film" One of the two who work in London said "the music was a good way to increase the level of tension and suspense because it made you feel like the place is quite dark." This was really positive feedback and I am pleased with it because I felt that the music went really well with the film noir/thriller genre.

Other highlights of what they said included that the diegetic sound of the hanger is very eerie and a good way to create suspense. But not all of it was positive such as they felt the panning shot was too long and that they got confused by the clock and clip that had been paused.

We chose to go against the normal thriller convention of showing the protagonist in the opening. We chose to show the antagonist due to her being the main character of the film. When the protagonist is shown first the audience starts to route for them and that stays all the way through the film, but the audience could tell that the character was dark and so had no one to route for and it means that were not as connected with the characters as they are normally. We also tried to use colour representations in two different ways in the opening, for example the white of the dress is used ironically because white represent innocence which our character is not. Whereas the red of the lipstick represent love or danger which is what this character is all about, with how she is dangerous and she can make others fall in love with her.

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