Evaluation - Part Five

 How did I attract/address my audience?

Within my film opening, the main thing I would have used to attract my audience, would have been the enigma codes, as there is no linear story to my opening, what attracts the audience is that there is no explanation of what is going on. But at the same time, it doesn't make you think too much, so forth fitting in with my target audience, as enigma codes (especially at the start) are often a favorite for mainstream horror audiences.
As shown by the comments, both of the Facebook responses I used showed that they liked the film and wanted to see more, meaning my enigma codes did indeed attract my audience, as both of them are more mainstream than anything, and come from a C1 and C2 background, they also both thought that the film could have been scary in the future, I think, from the responses I got, the faces of the teenagers staring directly into the camera were probably one of the scariest parts, to an older audience, it'd be threatening as teenagers are the unknown, and so often portrayed as the ruin of society, to each other though, teenagers can also be very scary, all it takes is a different social group to scare you, and this shows a large variety of people all staring directly into the camera, therefor at the audience. I didn't get any comments about the ever so slightly sexualized image of the character with the most screen time, but you probably wouldn't if you knew the person playing the character in real life anyway, but perhaps it was noticed less than I expected, if so, maybe it's better as it could have put off females from liking her, as it was, nobody showed any disliking for the character. The only thing people didn't particularly like is that some of the shots didn't look professional, which we felt we did the best we could with the equipment we had, but if we had more expenses, and more professional equipment, it could have looked much better.
They said they wanted to carry on watching, I think this is probably because of the enigma codes, they want to know why the main character was in distress, and why the faces were staring, more than one of the people I showed the video to asked me what was going on, and what would happen later on, even though I didn't know what would happen later on. Most of the expectations I had for the audience came through, I wasn't expecting proper terror or fear from them, I was expecting curiosity mostly, it wasn't meant to send true fear, just a slight worry. They all mentioned both the faces when asked on what made them think it was to be a Horror (they all said they thought it would be a horror), and they also mentioned the music, I think these two conventions definitely brought it to the horror genre, without it, I doubt it would have been quite as obvious, if obvious at all. The editing to give the main character a walk where we slowly got closer and closer to her face, until you saw her move in slow motion, glancing over at something we can't see gives horror conventions, along with the people staring into camera as the 'character' walks, the mise-en-scene we used on the characters staring into the screen was just a plain, white background, to give them all exactly the same background and stare, so they all have something in common whilst the main character doesn't, you can't focus on things in the background, just them.
Overall I believe my opening was fairly successful, it was obvious what we were going for, and the audience showed that they understood that, even if it wasn't perfectly professional, it still worked.