5. Evaluation Question: How Did You Attract/Address Your Audience

How Did You Attract/Address Your Audience?


We wanted to create a creature feature opening (see here research into what genres)
We chose this because it's a not a well known sub genre of horror and we felt it would appeal to our target audience of the 15-25 year olds.

We used a teenage boy, similar age of our target audience making it easier for them to relate and sympathise with the character. (Click here for the potential actors for the part)
When originally planning the opening we wanted to use a cast of young teenagers that found their way to the house to really appeal to our audience, we've seen this used in films such as 'House of Wax' and thought this would be perfect for our target audience but using one actor resulted in being more convenient and vulnerable.

We predicted our secondary audience would be aimed at an older audience, 45+, after looking at the results for the ages of the audience attending the well known horror films 'The Number 23' and 'Secret Window' both showing that people over 45 went to see the film.

 Due to our low budget we used a lot of social network sites and other free promotional sites available to us such as Youtube and facebook to get our media product known. We posted the final media product onto Youtube (Which can be watched by clicking here) allowing anyone to see the footage and give feedback using the 'like/dislike' feature on Youtube. By uploading the media product onto a video sharing website, it has the potential to go viral becoming available to thousands of people globally.

Social media sites such as youtube, twitter and facebook are popular amongst our target audience giving us access to make users of these sites aware of our media product for free.

 

Including a dog in the opening helped provoke a lot of sympathy from the audience, as dogs are seen as man's best friend and they wouldn't want to see the animal harmed.
In all feedback we received  the whimpering of the dog was featured frequently showing just how much attention the dog gained in the opening.



The horror film genre is very popular amongst young adults, and the opening is left on a cliff hanger helping, enhancing the suspense for our audience.
Desolate challenges contemporary conventions of the genre as we went against the stereo type of a typical horror film, in that we used a male protagonist and an animal.