Evaluation - Question Five

How did you attract/address your audience?



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To produce my opening thriller sequence, I first had to carry out a lot of primary and secondary research. Primary research such as questionnaires and vox pops are important because they allow you to see what your target audience finds to be successful and unsuccessful in a thriller film. This helps you to consider what to include in your own.


Secondary research was carried out first. I started off by researching and analysing previous thriller products so I could see what worked well in all of them, get inspiration and ideas for my own and outline the strengths and weaknesses in each thriller. I also looked into age certificates to figure out what my target audience would be. This helped my group because it let us know who our product would be aimed at.




Then I researched narrative theory before completing questionnaires. We decided to follow Aristotle's narrative theory which states that a sequence should focus on themes which include an inciting incident, a dramatic question, a character goal, a protagonist and antagonist, stakes, a resolution and elements of sympathy and empathy. We planned to include as many of these in our sequence as possible. The inciting incident is that the antagonist was abused because it shows the audience why he is mentally unstable. Dramatic questions include: will the victim escape and why is the antagonist doing what he is doing? Character goals vary for the different characters; for the antagonist the character goal is to relive the anger and pain that his mother has caused for him by killing victims that resemble her appearance. The victims goal is simply to escape and survive.


The antagonist in the sequence is a psychological serial killer and the protagonist is the victim. Stakes that our sequence will explore are the young victims lives and how many the killer kills before he gets caught. The audience feels sympathy and empathy for the victim because they know that they are innocent and doubt that they will escape.  Sympathy is further felt but for the antagonist. As the audience discovers the reasons of his murders and the truth of his upbringing they begin to feel sorry for him. My group has decided to follow this theory because it is the most conventional to a thriller film and our opening sequence includes all of the points that the theory highlights. The narrative theory showed us what aspects of a narrative are successful in a thriller and gave us some guidelines to follow when creating our own narrative.


Once we decided on a narrative theory we started to create a questionnaire and present it to members of our target audience. We started off asking questions regarding their age and gender so we had an idea of who our target audience would be. Most of the sample we questioned were aged 18+ and we had an equal number of males and females. We then went on to ask questions that could inspire our opening sequence. We asked them what their favourite thriller film was so we could analyse it for inspiration. We found that the most popular thriller film was The Conjuring.


We also asked our sample what sub genre of thrillers they prefer and most answered with psychological thrillers. This is why we chose to base our media product in that sub genre.





The questionnaires were filled out by members of our target audience. This was useful because we could now see what our audience would expect and want to see from a thriller sequence, also giving us guidelines to follow. We created vox pops by filming members of our target audience as we presented them with the questionnaire and they gave us answers. This was useful as it gave us informative and qualitive data.


After analysing and annotating other media products, I decided to begin to plan my own with my group. We planned micro-elements like the sound, cinematography, mise-en-scene and editing.

When planning we thought about the previous research we had carried out in order to make our thriller as successful as possible. Research helped me plan my media products because it outlined useful conventions to use, strengths and weaknesses to consider and me ideas and inspirations to use for the narrative or costumes for example. Ideas and inspirations I received from research include hiding the identity of the antagonist, using an isolated setting, presenting gender roles in a stereotypical way and using sound, lighting or cinematography to create suspense, shock and surprise.