Q5.

How did you attract/ address your audience?

In our opening sequence we wanted to grab the attention of our target audience straight away, and entice them into wanting to watch the rest of the film. I feel we achieved this through creating many enigmas in the opening sequence so the audience would want to find out what, why and how something has happened.

Firstly to get the viewers interested in our film we posed a disruption before the equilibrium. We did this by having the first few shots of the protagonist character waking up, lost and confused about her whereabouts and how she has got there. Flashbacks then occur showing the previous night, and eventually the attack that took place, this party is the equilibrium in the film (shown after the disruption).

We decided to begin the film with a disruption as we felt this would automatically grab the audiences attention, and get them wondering about what has happened. This is an aspect which Saw uses in their film, the characters wake up in a place which is very unfamiliar (there has not yet been an equilibrium posed).

disruption equilibrium

Then…

By having flashbacks in our opening sequence it makes the sequence not flow in chronological order. We decided to do this as we felt it would make the audience concentrate and be more enticed by the film, as to understand they would also have to follow the flashbacks. As our target audience is mainly teenagers, we feel that they would be able to follow and enjoy this film as they audience also has to work out what has happened, due to the many enigmas which we have posed in the opening sequence.

Narrative devices are another technique which can be used in films to help the audience understand what has happened in the past before the disruption. However we decided not to use any of these techniques as we felt that our target audience would be able to figure out what has happened themselves, through the flashbacks we put in.

Through distorting the sense of time, we created many enigmas for our audience such as:

What actually happened the night before? How did she get there? Who was her attacker, and will she ever find out?

Enigmas are good for an opening sequence to a film, as it will make your target audience continue to watch the film as they want these questions to be answered, and maybe to also see if they were right with the conclusions they came to. I many enigmas are posed in the opening sequence of a film, they can gradually get answered by the audience and the characters as the film progresses, this way the audience may feel as thought they are involved in the story.

How? Who? Where?

By creating oppositions in an opening sequence, the audience can instantly choose who’s side they are on, and who they hope to succeed by the end of the film. This is usually created by the film, to make sure the audience prefer one character then the other. As in our film the audience will obviously hope for the teenage girl to find out who her attacker was, and how she got there, and not want the villain to strike again.

This is similar in the Saw film, as we want the two victims to be released or to find a way of escaping, and not to be trapped and killed like the dead man lying between them. It is good for a film to create binary oppositions, as it can help build tension when maybe then two oppositions meet. If the audience did not care about what character they were supporting then the film would be pointless and not enjoyable.

The characters you support are those who are innocent and are in danger.

In our opening sequence we have not really built up any suspense or tension, as we felt it was not needed in a film like ours. This is because the disruption has already taken place, and this is usually when the suspense and tension is created in the film. This is similar to the opening sequence of Saw, as the disruption has already happened prior to the start of the film, no suspense is created in the opening sequence.

As there is no suspense created in our opening sequence, we have created a feeling of uneasiness and loneliness, much like the atmosphere created in Saw. We felt that this mood should be set in our opening sequence instead of tension or suspense.

In our opening sequence we have included certain ideologies about villains, victims and their gender. In our opening sequence our protagonist character is the victim as she has been attacked and left in the middle of nowhere, this is a typical ideology we have used, the female in the story being the victim. We decided to stick with the ideology which is known and used in many films, that the innocent victim is female. However in the saw film both of the victims who find themselves trapped in a strange location are both male. We felt that although this would work it would probably be less realistic, especially in the film world.

We have also used an ideology about teenagers, as our protagonist character had been to a party the night before, had a few drinks and woken up in an unknown location. We felt our target audience could relate to this type of situation.

Female victim

Male victim

We have used media language to help put our opening sequence together. By using the mixture of both deigetic and non-deigetic sounds in our sequence we have created a sense of loneliness and eeriness for the protagonist character. We felt that the sounds of the river and her breath, along with the slow strings would entice our audience, as its clear she is not suppose to be there.

The transitions and editing we have used for the flashbacks have helped clarify the difference between what is happening now and what occurred the previous night. I feel that by including flashbacks like this, black and white with wash transitions, it has made it a lot clearer for our audience.

We have attracted our audience to our opening sequence by posing enigmas, beginning with a disruption, using certain ideologies and with the use of media language.