Evaluation Question 5

'How did you attract/address your audience?'
At the start of the opening, we used an establishing shot to show the location that the opening is filmed in, and this attracts the audience because it is conventional for this genre (psychological horror) and our ideal target audience would ideally be attracted by this initial introduction to the film's settings. Then, the titles start. This automatically attracts the audience because it is again very conventional for the film genre. The colors of the titles are red, which is archetypally presented as being the color of blood and signifies and foreshadows what happens later on in the film. The movement of some of the titles, seemingly energetic, suggests that this opening will be interesting and exciting to watch. Film openings that include these types of effects of a similar genre include the films 'Carrie', and 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'. Also, the font is the same colour as ours because the colors is associated typically with blood, which signifies the murder that happens in our opening.
When our actress starts to call out in hysteric tones, this is what signifies the bad things that are fore coming. During our audience research, we learned that this is an effective method that attracts the film opening.
The puzzle in the opening that the audience are ending up thinking about themselves is why this woman was murdered. The element of mystery and not everything being shown in the opening keeps the audience interested, because they are shown the protagonist and automatically want to know what happens from then onward. This is another thing we learned when filming our audience testing. The type of audience has is the ones that enjoy hanging onto the edge of their seats, and we have done this by making short cuts between each shot and having music that creates suspense on in the background. This is an emotional pleasure that the audience of our target audience for this specific genre enjoy. It is also a visceral pleasure. We have also tried to fulfill the counter culture attraction in our opening that gets the audience immersed in this opening, because we want the audience to get very involved with the opening, because if they empathize for some characters it makes them more likely to carry on and watch the rest of the film.
The shots that show our actress running down into some murky woods help to connotate that something bad is going to happen, because normally this sort of location is assosciated with a murder in a film of this genre. This helps to keep the audience involved with the story.When introducing the protagonist, we also help the audience with the puzzle of why the negative music, and it keeps them on the edge of their seats and therefore still engaged with the opening. We also tried to include various shots of the antagonist go fast, so the audience have less time to visualise and more time to imagine what is going to happen. As the music begins to get louder, it becomes obvious that something bad is going to happen and this again helps to create supsense.
The reason we included many shots of the protagonist creeping up on the antagonist is that it makes the audience wander what he is going to do, why he is doing it, and we give them a lot of time to think about this whilst making the atmosphere a lot more tense. We make the audience scared of the man in black because we don't show his face through the whole opening.