Making Meaning
What would be the audience for your media product? How did you attract/address your audience?
For our opening sequence our initial target audience was teenagers, young people and any thriller lovers out there who want to see our film. Now that we have made our opening sequence, I can now say that I believe our film would attract all those groups of people above as well as any action fans out there in the world as our film is a hybrid; part of the thriller/action genre. The way we attract our audience in the first two minute opening sequence is, I believe, mainly down to the sound, pace of the scene and the camera work.
The camera work is particularly significant to the thriller/action genre as it can focus on certain characters, objects or even actions which the Director decides to emphasise on to the audience. The Director would emphasis on a particular aspect to make sure the audience are aware of the significance of it or to add a deeper meaning - for instance love. An example of when the camera focuses on a certain object is the stirring of the coffee - this not only parallels with the end of the film (full film), it also helps represent peace and tranquility which contrasts what has just been witnessed in the scene before. However, there are also times when the camera will focus on a certain object to purely give enough time for the audience to read and take something in, such as the threat placed upon the picture frame of Ellie and her best friend - indicating that it is a threat on Ellie's life if Jamie does not cooperate.
There was also the special effects which I, the editor, have used to enhance the film at the most appropriate moments. As well as using transitions to evoke the sense of a lapse of time between shots, I have added sound effects such as the 'ticking clock' when the titles appear to help release the tension and suspense from the previous scene as well as to show time has gone by (in this case backwards) and act as a sound bridge into the morning and the alarm clock going off. I have also brighten one particular morning scene as when it was shot, there must have a been a very slight change in the outside light and consequently this could be noticed on screen. However, with the advantages of using iMovie HD, I have been able to increase the contrast and brightness of the scene to keep the continuity right throughout scene two and the whole film.
Both of these examples, camera work and special effects, both contribute to how we ensured that the meaning would be apparent to the audience. It did this by showing one of its main elements we wanted to portray, suspense and tension but juxta-posed by the idyllic and relaxed morning. The length of the shots were short for the first scene of the interrogation to make it fast-paced adding to the tension while I made sure in the editing process that the length between shots for scene two in the morning would be longer and consequently contributing to reducing the tension and demostrating the happy and calm life that Jamie and Ellie live. On top of this, the message or moral that the audience would recieve would be further on in the film but would show how you should not go off somewhere (in this case, follow the clues left by the stalker (Rose) ) without telling anyone but thinking you know best; so believing you can do it all by yourself - it would be giving the message that it is not cowardly if you ask for help.
When we were given our initial brief, within the first five minutes of getting together in groups, we had decided we wanted to produce a thriller. This in mind, we decided our target audience for our film should be young and so I perceived this to be around the 15 - 20 year old bracket. We also handed out questionnaires to research into our target audience and whether we had mis-calculated which generations would watch our thriller. We found out from our questionnaires that we were right but we needed to expand our age bracket as there were a couple of people who were in their late thirty's who said they liked to watch thrillers, however, not necessarily thriller/horror genre though.
After the initial brief and thought process, we then moved onto looking at the research that we had already conducted when watching opening sequences of films. One of the films that I have mentioned already in one of my previous blogs that we looked at was Memento. We took from this, regarding our creative process, the way that the film started off in the future or at the end of the film. This gave the idea that instead of a normal, straight-forward storyline, we could switch between present and past; this is what we ended up going through with from pre-production to our finished product.
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During the entire production process of our opening sequence, we made one or two creative decisions based on our target audience. One such time when we made a creative decision was when I had written the script. When rehearing the script through with Agnes, Thomas and Abbey, we all recognised that we could change the language to more of a 'heated and tense' conversation in the interrogation scene in relation to our target audience, young to middle age people. However, when it came to the editing stage - I realised, along with Thomas, that the scene was far more dramatic with only the key lines such as ". . .call" . . "Ellie" with non-diegetic sound over the top that we created through Garageband. Secondly, we wanted to be creative in the language and add certain words in as we did not want to use simple, basic words when there are adults watching our film expecting the interrogation scene to take advantage of using didactic language. Therefore, we changed the language to represent the characters personality as well as their age, despite deciding in the end that it was far more dramatic through visual than aural.In filming, we took the decision to keep to the storyboard most of the time as we had thought about our target audience through out the storyline and storyboarding process. Nevertheless, as just mentioned above, the storyboard does not necessarily represent all the opening sequence due to the decision made in the editing process of using only the key lines as well as the film was 4:30mins long so we had to cut 2:30mins out because it can only be two minutes. I have watched the opening sequence many times over (to the point where you know every mini second off by heart!) and have made sure that the interpretations that we wanted to get across are fulfilled and are not overshadowed by any other possibly interpretations and more importantly fits in with our target audience. In the end, we wanted to check on the interpretations given out as all three of us want our film and opening sequence to appeal to many groups of people and specifically our target audience.
The next step in discovering the audience's reaction to our idea and eventually the opening sequence was once we had finished. We decided to show a few people the opening sequence so they could assess, examine and evaluate it. This helped us a lot as the critic reports allowed for people to make any criticisms of the opening sequence so we could take this on board and alter it if possible. This would give us even more of a reason to improve it if needed, but luckily we have not received any criticisms of our film.
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