Evaluation 5

How did you attract/address your audience

Throughout the production of our opening sequence, the group and I included many different techniques to physically engage the audience with our film. This includes the use of questionnaires and myself creating and audience feedback video; this to give us crucial information on what the audience did/did not like. In our actual opening sequence, we used non-diegetic and ambient music to create a dramatic atmosphere for the audience to connect to. Our uses of extreme close ups broke the fourth wall between Hannah and the audience by staring directly at them, making them feel a part of the film themselves and building a personal relationship (uses and gratifications) with the protagonist.

Hannah breaking the fourth wall

Questionnaire:

Following our dis-conclusion on what to name our opening sequence, the group and I gave the audience a briefing on what our opening sequence would be about, we displayed this through a powerpoint presentation in which we presented to the rest of our classmates and we asked them to fill our a questionnaire determining on what we called our film. I previously made a blog post on the questionnaire (see blog post Audience Interaction - Film Title Questionnaire). We gave a straightforward selection of film titles, those including: Songbird, Extortion, Silence, Silent, Mute followed by a choice of 'other'. Overall the predominant winner was 'Mute' and we decided to keep it as the title of our opening sequence.

Audience Feedback Video:

As a further addition to our research, we decided to include the audience in what their opinions were  about the first draft of our opening sequence - what they liked and dislikes - followed by what aspects they thought we needed to change.

From this video, we learned what mistakes we had made whilst producing the sequence; here are a list of some:

 "I think you need to make your story line a bit clearer"

Previously, the opening sequence had seemed unclear because we did not include any indication as to how Hannah turned from 'good' to 'bad'. Originally, we believed that this created a greater sense of enigma but it lead to the audience being too confused. To amend this, we added in a section in the middle of the sequence briefly showing Hannah being washed in a bath, surrounded by excessively clean doctors equipment leading the audience to understand that Hannah has been kidnapped with the intention of harm towards her.

Here are some of the images from the montage of short clips showing the changes we made to our opening sequence regarding the criticisms about the unclear storyline

"The subtitles are hard to read, so maybe you could change the font"

The subtitles were initially difficult to read because of our predominant white and blue colour scheme . We experimented with using darker fonts such as black and blue for our subtitles, however it did not look professional so we decided to keep the font as white.Moreover, we took this criticism into great consideration and we ended up adding a shadow to the back of our white font as this made it easier for the audience to read. So even over the white surface (below on Hannah's fingers) the audience was still able to read the subtitles.

Camera/Audio/Editing/Mise-En-Scene:

I have made direct connections between the audience and what is on the screen in order to attract and draw them in. As aforementioned, my use of close-ups allowed the audience to form a sense of belonging with Hannah as she breaks the fourth wall, this means Hannah is semi-interacting with the audience making them feel as if they are actually there. The extreme close up on 

 Hannah's eyes is a seriously intimidating shot as it looks directly to the audiences eyes which directly addresses them.

The slow motion used in specific shots builds up an intense atmosphere which grabs the audiences attention, this in conjunction with the non-diegetic slow to fast paced music inflicts horror on the audience.

The use of a fast paced montage engages the audience by the audience having to watch and keep up with the ever changing scene; the engima codes in which it brings makes the audience want to carry on watching.