GENDER
Audience Research has demonstrated that thriller films are more popular with men than women with only 6/8 finding them enjoyable in comparison to only 3/15 women.
With this in mind we attempted to target the female audience more with an inclusion of a large amount of female characters (there are only female characters in the opening) including the two main roles of the homicide investigators, hopefully making it more relatable to the audience.
AGE
During the filming process we asked for feedback using social networking sites; knowing that the most regular social networking users parallel with the most regular cinema-going demographic (17-24). We used youtube to post a rough draft of our video and put links to the video on instagram to receive feedback.
Here are some things that we were told:
"Will it be turned into a real film? i'd be interested in how the story line would develop"
-Male 17
"Are you going to put in music? I think it works well without it; the background sounds set the scene well"
-Female 21
While originally we were going to put in music we decided to adapt to the audience feedback and looped the background sound of falling rain to create an ambient and natural atmosphere with digetic sound.
PREVIOUS RESEARCH AND ADAPTATION TO IT.
We had also interviewed a group of 16-17 year olds, taking in mind our film would be a 15 (due to the themes it's dealing with and occasional strong language). They had told us that they found it 'boring' and 'long' when the 'Sixth Sense' credits came up separately on a black screen before the film had started, therefore we made sure to have credits overlapping the initial scenes.
-However looking at film openings such as 'Zodiac' i saw there was a gap in credits as a shot of a sign was showed; this gave the audience time to focus on the writing rather than reading the credits, we therefore tried to not have too many credits in the second section of our opening, where the detectives are speaking: This in turn gives the audience time to focus on the dialogue which naturally would happen; leading people to neglect the credits.
SIMILAR FILMS COMPARISON
'Gone Girl' is a relatively recent film with a similar storyline and dealing with similar themes therefore we had decided to look at statistics and reviews.
Demonstrated that:
The film was based on a novel with a cunning female narrator so this adaptation shows how female audiences can be drawn in if there is an increase in female characters; here there are the characters of 'Amy' and 'Rhonda' both playing pivotal roles.
