question 5- how did we address/ attract our audience?
While making 'Imprint', we began to understand how important it was to ensure we were attracting a specific target audience. Our basic target was males and females aged 15-25. Although this is a large age bracket and isn't gender specific, we feel it's relevant and appealing to many people who would fall into this category for several reasons.
mise-en-scene
Casting- We attracted our target audience by using an attractive female site of activity of similar age to our target audience. At 17 we felt that she was perfect to appeal to viewers at both ends of our age spectrum.
As Elle is a pretty blonde girl, we felt that this would draw a male viewer's attention even more as statistics show men like watching things that attractive females feature in. Vulture.com says 'A full 56 percent of the 'Girls' so-called "linear" audience (anybody who watches the premiere or any of the week's rebroadcasts live or through a DVR) is male; 44 percent is female. 'Girls' has lots of pretty female actresses in and is aimed at a similar age group to 'Imprint' and over half of the people watching 'Girls' are not actually female. This shows that a pretty girl is great starting point for attracting male viewers. Also, if the female actress is attractive and young, female characters are more likely to be drawn to the film because they will either idolize the actress or engage with her emotionally through watching what happens in the film. |
Location-
We attracted our target audience by filming 90% of 'Imprint's' scenes in a school environment. We felt that this attracts our target audience successfully because if each person is between 15-25, they will either still be in a school environment regularly, or be young enough to have firm memories of their school times. Either of these situations will then provoke the audience to identify and connect with the film and the characters more because of the familiar setting. |
Props-
We attracted our target audience with our use of props. We did some research and it turns out that Alfred Hitchcock, the media theorist and 'master of suspense' was obsessed with blondes and cast only blondes in his movies. Scholars have noted that Hitchcock’s blondes have become one of the most potent icons of our era. With this and the idea that so many females in our target audience are concerned with hair and make up in mind, we decided that it would really grab the audience's attention to show a tuft of blonde hair covered in blood that's obviously been ripped out of the victim's head at the end of the O.T.S. It's a well circulated stereotype that blonde girls are meant to be less intelligent and therefor we pursued the idea that using an actress with blonde hair and showing that hair up close would make the O.T.S more gripping to watch because normally people with less intelligence aren't as good at escaping danger, so the blonde hair will always foreshadow danger. This symbolism also helps us to address the needs of our young target audience- adrenaline. |
Costumes-
We have further attracted the attention of our target audience by dressing our site of activity in currently fashionable, branded clothing. This makes the O.T.S more engaging because it can be much more relatable for the audience when they also wear clothes just like the girl on screen who has just been brutally murdered. It adds an extra element of realism to the film and makes the audience want to keep watching because they are lead to feel that it could happen to them. |
Music
We used a tense sound track to back our entire O.T.S. We felt that this catered for the expectations of our target audience well because our target audience is age 15-25 and they want tense films that fill them with adrenaline and shock. The soundtrack contributes to this!
editing
Because our opening title sequences switches between a linear plot (Elle being killed in the toilet) to a non linear plot (flashbacks of previous stalking), we feel that we have addressed a young target audience. Younger people always want to see they latest thing and we agreed that having a more contemporary approach to the editing would attract our target audience successfully.
The storyline
As the key theme of 'Imprint' is stalking young girls in a school environment, we felt this would attract our target audience and address issues people aged 15-25 are facing in today's society. With stranger danger becoming a more prominent subject, we felt that focusing our story line on a very similar topic would be sure to attract attention from our target audience and even those outside of it- perhaps concerned parents.