Question 5

Q5. How did you attract/address your audience?

I think that we used quite a lot of audience pleasures when making this film for both genres. On the action side we used the audience pleasure of a fight scene, even though it was very brief and was predominantly one-sided, and the opening as a whole could be considered a near death experience as if the protagonist didn’t protect himself, he could have been tortured and killed by the antagonist. We also used audience pleasures from the horror genre too, as we made it seem that the antagonist have more control over the protagonist in the first part of the scene, we also made sure we filmed somewhere which created a dark and gloomy atmosphere, as this is typical of a film in the horror genre.

We also made the protagonist look and behave as normal as possible, this is why he behaves initially confused and is scared where he is. His clothing is of a casual standard, wearing a navy jumper, black jeans and trainers. Our casting of someone who looks like our target market of between 15 and 24 was very important as it helped our target audience, who were predominantly male, relate to him.

Our opening resembles the start of Saw II, as it consists of a man in a torture room, initially sat in a chair and a male voice addressing the protagonist. However, the opening ends differently, as the protagonist ends up escaping in ours. This could lead people who have seen Saw II to see similarities when watching ours therefore predicting a similar ending, though that isn’t the case. This is when our opening defies the horror genre, as the protagonist doesn’t die. Another thing we took from Saw II was the idea of using a TV to present a bit of back-story behind who the protagonist is, though we did it in a different format having a news report as an alternative to having the antagonist giving the protagonist a task. The multiple static cuts we use transitioning between the news report and the antagonist walking around help to question who the antagonist is and people who have seen Saw II may recognise the editing style we adopted as this is similarly used in the opening scene again. That style of editing is very typical in horror films, so it helps our film become associated with the genre a bit more.