Evaluation Question 5

 5. How did you attract/address your audience?

 To draw in a young adult audience, we used a range of actors from this age group and chose a Drum & Bass song, the genre being very popular with students and young people who frequently go to clubs. To ensure we had a fair representation of modern Britain, we used extras from different ethnicities and different backgrounds to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief and immerse themselves in the story by creating as normal a setting as possible, making it all the more shocking when we find out noone can speak.  We have a good looking and talented cast of young actors and we could include an actor with critical acclaim such as an ‘Orange Rising Star’ award to give the film more credibility and generate publicity.

• The issues tackled in the plot and overall feel of the film lends itself quite well to a viral marketing campaign- particularly popular with the young Web 2.0 generation.
•  We decided that a film predominantly without dialogue may be a bit too dull and difficult to understand so we thought that the rest of the film could have Ava’s voiceover so the audience can empathise and relate to her more easily. However we chose not to include this in the opening sequence to generate lots of enigma and make viewers want to continue watching.
• As previously mentioned, the inclusion of a female protagonist helps give the film more female appeal.

Action films are an incredibly popular genre but Drama is not traditionally favoured by a young audience that generally enjoys ‘having a laugh’. However, we have seen through highly popular TV series Skins, and hard hitting dramatic films such as Kidulthood (Clarke 2006), Trainspotting (Boyle 1996) and This Is England (Meadows 2006) that there is definitely a market for drama, all these films cited most popular with males aged 17-29 (source: IMDB Pro).

To publicise our film sequence, we held a screening in school creating a Facebook event and sticking posters up around the areas most frequently visited by older students and sixth formers. We kept the description very minimal, just outlining important information, playing on our audience curiousity so they would be hooked in to see it, just as we want them to the real film. 

Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications Theory

Our film and opening sequence harnesses this theory in order to appeal to our intended audience:

 The strange idea, what if we lived in a world without voices? is a strong talking point and arouses discussion between friends, family and film fans alike satisfying curiousity, establishing personal relationships and particularly appealing to a young audience as it concerns a contemporary topical issue: the proliferation of technology and how it is leading people to communicate less and less face to face. Our film is very escapist, as it is a dystopia, so the audience is able to fully immerse themself in the films narrative enriching their experience of the film. 

We were succesful in appealing to our audience as our feedback from our screening was overwhelmingly positive, with ratings of 6-10 and a median of 8 with a majority saying they would see the film if it came out because of its original and unusual idea.

Mute - Filled In Questionnaires

A selection of feedback questionaires