Group 5 AS 2015/16: EVALUATION ACTIVITY 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

Introduction:

Ways in which companies attract their audiences to view their film is through public marketing/advertising. This includes advertisement techniques like teaser trailer, posters, social media, merchandise, official trailers etc. The bigger the budget companies have tend to mean they have the ability to create an more extravagant and captivating marketing campaign. Companies with this ability would be transnational companies which we find all over our high streets. Some film companies examples would be the likes of 'Marvel Comics' and 'Lions Gates films'. They have an higher ability to reach larger and bigger target audiences compared to a small independent distribution companies like 'Lightwork films'.

Attraction through storyline

We believe one in which we can attract an audience is too create a eye gluing storyline. We did this by having an protagonist showing suspicious actions, walking through a relatable and recognizable outer city alley, to give the audience an impression that perhaps he just killed/brutally murdered his wife. We create questions in the audiences head as they want to know why, what and did this actually happen. The transformation to the second setting of the interrogation room gives the audience more evidence to show that perhaps the protagonist did take part in the crime. Overall our storyline is always creating questions and our target audience of teenagers I feel will enjoy this due to typical teenagers enjoying to solve problems.

Social Media

As our target audience of 15+ being the digital native generation I think social media is one of the easiest and most cost effective of reaching our target audience. We found out that 94% of British teenagers use at least one social media sites, so by having a way of attracting our audience through sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram we thought it would be very beneficial to increase our target audience by using this type of technology.

On our specific pages we would post news, status's and behind the scene footage with casts and camera crew to keep our audience as engaged and as close to the film as possible. This is beneficial as our thriller opening could even reach the same audiences as larger professional films would.

Here are some examples of our social media pages:

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

Use of Visual advertisements

From our research we found that 67% of consumers consider, clear detailed images to be very important and carry even more weigh than the product information's, full description and customer ratings. Also 60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business whose images appear in local search results. Most importantly, 94% more total views on average are attracted by content compelling images than content without images. These statistics are clear evidence that posters and others ways of showing your finished product to the world are extremely important and much more so then just written content. Therefore the importance of the visual aspects is extremely important.

Here is an example of a newspaper article:

Thriller conventions

We did not include all the main thriller conventions as most thriller films, Hollywood ad independent do not include all in the opening of their films but throughout.

The main conventions of a thriller include:

Low key lighting
Quick cuts
Suspenseful music
Violence
Cliff-hangers
Antagonist
Protagonist

All of these aspects contribute to the suspense and tension throughout the film in turn making the audience stay intrigued and excited.

Some of these aspects can be drawn to the campaigning of the film and many real thriller products to use this in trailers and posters.

Below is a range of different posters we made to attract our audience

Here is an analysis of one of the posters to show how it would attract an audience:

These are some popular film posters that we were inspired by:

When looking at film posters there are some examples which we took inspiration from.

On the left is the film poster for the film 'Drive' (2011, Refn).

Some similarities we got from this film poster is the big bold letter title. We used this similar font technique as we think that by having big bold letters it would grab our audiences attention even more. In addition to this the central figure of both our protagonist (Ethan) and the character from Drive (Ryan Gosling) both have very stern facial expressions showing perhaps they are hiding something. I think by having this the audience is increasing being captivated by the poster. One difference is that we tend to use much darker colours in our posters with the black setting however the film poster of Drive uses a more aluminous colour range with the pink, neon blue and green.

Another film poster we got inspiration from is an old film called 'Calasablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz). A similarity we have in comparison to our film poster on the right is the colour scheme. They both convey the colour scheme of black, white and red. I think this is quiet an attractive way to attract an audience as even though our intentions is to attract an 15+ I also feel with the classical vintage film poster style we also have the potential to grab the attention of perhaps an older demographic. A difference between the film posters is that more than one characters appear on the poster compared to our examples. The reason why I did not add any more characters as I felt I did not want to take away the importance on our protagonist to try and attract our audience and I did not want the posters to give away too much.

Marketing campaign

Here are more ways in which a distribution company could distribute our film.

our examples: