Attracting our audience

Questionnaires

In order to know what our audiences wanted we did audience research through questionnaires: our results were very useful in outlining vital parts of our narrative and elements we used in the actual opening

• Our results clearly showed that we needed to target a female audience.

• We therefore attracted our target audience by using a female character and actor so they would be able to relate to her.

Actress Chloe Antony Pillai

Chloe can also appeal to a white audience which was the majority of our target audience from our research and also other nationalities such as black and mixed because her race is ambiguous.

Our actress also looks between the age of 15-18 so the audience can relate to her further as most of our results were of people between that age. The typical audience for thrillers are normally adults, so aiming at teenagers is slightly unconventional. We then had to implement different conventions we often wouldn’t use for a mainstream commercial thriller.

To link with theme of youth and being in education further, we made the actress wear the colour white and have a school style shirt too.

The use of having short shorts was to allow the audience to not only relate to her in more of a casual way also, but to give the illusion that she has more skin showing or exposed, making her seem more vulnerable in her position. This is convention often used in thrillers to make the character look weaker, whereas we used it to appeal to the audience through pop culture fashion at the time but also to appeal to thriller watchers.

In the Psycho remake (1998) they use this method of making the female character look vulnerable by using less clothes also.

Pop culture celebrities also wearing Alice’s outfit in Social Suicide

We also put our villain in a hoody so it can link with the youth culture of common casual wear and the representation of teenage boys often depicted in the media and on the news of hooded teens being linked to gangs and violence.

Male teenagers are often presented as violent, disrespectful and linked to crimes such as shootings and knife crime. We used this stereotype in our opening to present an atmosphere that is realistic to what our audience would often see in the media and in their day to day lives.

Trainers, hooded tracksuit tops, guns and fingerless gloves gives our villain more of a criminal portrayal

We used a smart phone to appeal to our young technology based audience, a phone they themselves would own and want to own.

We also featured a common school setting, with tennis courts, buildings and bicycle racks so they can relate to where it’s set, so that as they are in education, they would also be familiar with a similar setting.