Evaluation of the Final Project (QUESTION 5)

Q.5 How did you attract/address your audience?

There were several ways in which we attracted our audience towards our final media product.  Firstly , the sound(lead and backing soundtrack) which we used in Sweet Vengeance was very soothing . Not only to our ears but also to our audiences’ ears.  We carried out a viewing of our film in our school during school hours (as mentioned in Evaluation Q-5) and we saw that when the movie started the audiences were relaxed and they didn’t look as if they were in a state of shock etc. But, from the scene where “Henry” enters his house and the Television signal distortion scene, the soundtrack changes to a more deep and in lay man’s words “Scary” soundtrack. During this period, we noticed that some of our audience came up closer to the screen to analyze what was going on, and some on the other hand already looked horrified.  So, the sound was one method we used to attract our audience.

Secondly, we kept dialogues in our product to a minimum. This enabled the audience to focus more attention on our soundtrack rather than the dialogues.  Besides the answering machine recordings , there were no additional dialogues added to the movie. Soundtracks, if used correctly and at the correct time can influence and change the tempo of the film completely and we wanted to implement this.

Thirdly, we did not give out everything in our opening titles. After viewing popular slasher film opening titles we found that  opening titles are meant to attract audience to watch the whole feature length film rather than give all of the suspense away by adding unnecessary details. We immediately cropped out the details we had put in our unedited version of Sweet Vengeance. We created enigma, and left “some strings unattached” i.e. some parts of the story to be discovered by the audience itself. This would motivate the viewers to demand the feature length film.

Above: We have purposely shown the Television already open and disrupted when our male character Henry enters his house. This makes the majority of the audience ask themselves “Why is this Television on?” “Did someone already visit his house when he was away?” “Is someone hiding in his house at the moment waiting to strike?” This creates enigma and horror, and the environment we wanted to create in our movie for our audience so they “keep wanted more”.

By the end of our opening title, the audience would have many questions unanswered, for example: Why did the female want to kill the male? Was the male drunk when he got home? Did he party all night? Did the male survive then? Was this all a dream? Will the male wake up in his bed now? So there is a definite chance that the audience would want to watch the full film.

There are many things which would attract the audience towards our films. The title "Sweet Vengeance" hides alot , makes the audience want to find out more. For example: mostly , the audience would definetly want to know what "Henry" did , why is the girl following him? The misc-en-scene would attract the audience , being a horror story it is shot in an isolated house , which is a very common convention for horror/slasher films for example: SAW 2 and HOUSE OF WAX were also shot in isolated houses and were very sucessful.