Evaluation Q. 5

How Did You Attract/Address Your Audience?

In Evaluation Question 4, I established the primary audience for my film as young adults and justified it with evidence from my opening sequence. Today, I will be discussing how I attracted and addressed this audience.

When I identified my target audience as young adults, I began to think of ways in which I could tailor my film opening in order to address or attract them. The first thing that I utilised to attract as well as directly address my audience was the cast. I chose to only cast young adults in the roles. This is an affective way to address the audience because involving an actor the same age as the audience will allow them to relate to the character, as people are more likely to relate and empathise with a character that is most similar to them i.e the same age group. This addresses and attracts the audience especially because it gives them representation, hence why they're more likely to relate to the character.

The age of the cast is not the only element that attracts the audience to the character. The physical appearance of the character will attract more widespread audiences because he is conventionally
attractive. According to psychological studies, people are more inclined to like and empathise with those they find attractive, so using an attractive actor as the protagonist will automatically make

Cast of the protagonist.

people more inclined to watch the film. The film is targeted at both men and women, and the gender of the character helps attract these audiences. For example, because the character is an attractive male, heterosexual women will be more inclined to watch it as he will appeal to them. Similarly with male audiences, because the main character is a man, they will likely feel able to relate to him better because he gives representation to men, which will, therefore, make them more inclined to watch the film as they have a character they can connect with.

Another way I attracted young adults is through the genre. Because genre helps define the target audience of a film, by following the conventions of the genres I chose closely, I was able to really appeal to the target audience commonly associated with these genres. This is because they would, firstly, definitely be able to identify the film as one of their favourite genres, but secondly, they would enjoy the use of common conventions as it's what they love about the genre. This is how I attracted young adults because the target audience associated with post-apocalyptic films is young adults. This is evident by the surge in popularity of post-apocalyptic films among young adults, for example, World War Z, Mad Max and so on.

The themes and content helped attract my audience too. This is because I involved very heavy and emotional themes such as suicide and grief. The reason this appeals to young adults is because

modern young adults are very open and serious about emotions and mental health issues, so a film giving representation to those who are suffering grief, depression or suicidal thoughts would be appealing to 21st Century young adults as it's very topical and sensitive and doesn't stigmatize or trivialize issues that they are commonly very passionate about. It gives a relatively accurate portrayal of someone who is struggling. Involving topical themes is an effective way to attract this age demographic because young adults nowadays are very informed and aware of current events.

The last subject matter in terms of the content of the film that I used to attract young adults was the use of the dog. Although the dog was originally part of the initial plot ideas, I developed this idea of incorporating the dog in order to tailor the film to young audiences. As stated in my evaluation question 4, loving dogs has become a huge fad among young adults, and therefore the incorporation of a dog would appeal to this trend. Furthermore, the type of dogs that seem to receive the most
attention from young adults is large, fluffy and goofy dogs. I played on this idea by casting Riot in the role as opposed to any of the other dogs I had considered to cast, because the other dogs would have been considered boring breeds and Riot fits well with the trend of large, fluffy and goofy dogs, therefore immediately appealing to a stereotypical young adult.

Lastly, in terms of distribution, I uploaded my film opening onto YouTube. This distribution device is most commonly used by younger audiences and therefore uploading my film here is the most effective way to directly address young adults.