Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

When deciding how our film should appeal to our audience, we decided to consult the uses and gratifications theory.

The theory of uses and gratifications states that there are four reasons that an audience will consume a piece of media:

• Escapism - An audience will consume a piece of media to immerse themselves in a narrative and escape the stress of life. This is commonly provided through action films, as the audience is able to involve themselves in a fictional story. Escapism will be the primary gratification provided by our film.
• Interaction - An audience will consume a piece of media to involve themselves in the actions of others. Our film will not directly compel interaction between different people. However, teenagers; a group included in our secondary target audience, will often go to the cinema with friends. Therefore there might be some social interaction derived from our film.
• Personal Identity - An audience will consume a piece of media to see a reflection of themselves or to learn more about themselves. It is possible that some members of our audience would relate to Blake, as he is passionate and affectionate towards those close to him. 
• Surveillance - An audience will consume a piece of media to learn more about what is happening in the world, whether it be a documentary or report. This is the gratification which is not provided by our film, as our narrative is fictional. 

Our primary gratification was escapism, which we tried to provide through a compelling narrative and intriguing visual style. In order to see if we had been successful, we created a survey for members of our target audience to fill in.

First, we decided to ask about who was answering the survey. We received 18 responses:

We discovered that the large majority of our feedback was from people aged between 13 and 24. There was a slight skew towards males, but this was expected. Although action films have a very wide appeal, it is common for the male audience to be slightly larger than the female audience.

Furthermore, we were able to see who responded to the survey from outside of the UK. We received 8 responses from the USA as well as a couple elsewhere in Europe. This information would suggest that the film would succeed in reaching a universal audience.

Next we gathered some feedback on whether the audience enjoyed the sequence:

Our feedback was very positive, with an average rating of 4.17/5. Furthermore, 16 out of our 18 responses said that they would watch the rest of the film.

Lastly, we asked for some specific detail on what our audience liked and what they didn't understand about our sequence:

These are the comments we received. Feedback on the story is
highlighted in red, comments on the visual style are in blue
and the way in which suspense was built is in green.

There was only one thing which persisted in our feedback about what was not understood. Multiple people were unsure of the dialogue and what was going on. However, this is something that could be easily resolved by tweaking the script to be more explicit.

Overall, I think we have been successful in reaching and attracting our target audience. The large majority of our feedback with praise directed to different elements of our sequence such as the visual style and story. The majority of our responders said that they understood the sequence, but I can understand that the script was a bit too vague in regards to revealing information about the characters and story.