Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

Through watching our final opening sequence, there are many shots that have a unique selling point to attract the audience to our film. The first thing I thought of was by screen grabbing a shot of the main character agent Carlson on the right, this automatically tells the audience that a middle aged male is involved and getting ready for work, I used this screen grab as in most action/thriller films an attractive middle aged Male would be used to attract the female market. Stereotypically the character of a film of this genre is sporty, athletic male. This shot also reveals agent Carlson's character. A attractive middle aged man attracts both male and female audiences. Females can be attracted through physical attraction and males through action. He is an intelligent person as he is wearing glasses, a shirt that make him look very presentable, and is getting ready in a mirror in an apartment that is his, this hints to the audience he is wealthy, and is getting ready to go somewhere.

I also picked up on something else that could be considered a unique selling point, here is another screen shot of Carlson looking at a picture of his daughter, the angle of the shot shows his daughter clearly, this could be a unique selling point as the audience would be lead into thinking something is going to happen to agent Carlson’s daughter as there would be a reason for the picture being viewed in a close up shot, this will create an intense feel to the audience as the picture is of a sweet, young girl who means a lot to the character .

The clip I found most interesting was the split shot, this would address the audience by comparing Carlson and the Terrorists together by having each character in a split shot, and this is very effective as it builds drama and panic towards the audience as they know something is going to happen. We used a split shot of Carlson tying up his shoe laces on his black polished work shoes, whilst the terrorist ties up the laces on his steel toe cap boots, we did this to make the audience wait and see what it going to happen next.

To gain the audiences’ feedback I gave out a number of questionaires to target audiences that i thought were suitable to watch our film, I handed out questionaires to males over 15 and females above 18. Doing this gave me clear results and gave me an indication of what needed improving and how we could refer back to our draft and see if we could adjust the editing in any way.When we came to doing our audience feedback we chose to pick 4 17 to 18 year old males (our primary demographic) and one 18 year old girl who we were interested on her reaction from the film because she wasn't the target audience. They all seemed to overall enjoy the opening, including the girl and came across as though they would go to the cinema or buy the DVD to watch again to show friends or family.

 The questionnaire was a success and most of the results come back positive, we also recorded a group of student’s thoughts and opinions on the film to get an idea of what they liked about it and how they could help us improve on it. The feedback recieved gave us some great idea's on what needed imrpoving or what could be included to make our film more of a success. The improvement given in our feedback was that the music should be used to accompany the dramatic scenes in order to help build suspense.

We researched an appropriate age rating for our film by going to the BBFC website. Our target audience would be certificate 15. This is because our primary demographic of 16 to 25 year olds would be more drawn to it as its not too light or heavy on adult content. However we could drop it down to a 12a rating to gain a larger market audience as it will be open to more people to view. This could change vastly as we could create the film again using more adult content that would rise the rating up to a 18 but this would restrict the audience. Over all I have researched the BBFC and have seen what is needed to create a 18+ film and a 12a film, overal i think that the most suitable rating for Dispatch would be a 15.

I have researched the BBFC wedbsite to choose a age rating that is most suitable for our short film. This helped me to choose the most reasonable age rating for my groups short film as I was not sure on how guns and terrorists would be rated by the BBFC. When researching I included all elements from our short film that I thought would be censored by my target audience. On the wedbite there was a very helpful link that showed me all the guidlines that would help me rate my film, this showed me what was most censored from top to bottom of a list of the worst and least harmful to viewers.