Extra evaluation- audience appeal

Our film trailer preliminary tasks took into consideration ideas of psychographics and demographics in order to account for the audience profile we wanted to appeal to. With preliminary tasks including the likes of researching the horror genre and context of ageism portrayed in horror and gothic literature, these themes of horror arising deciphered that we wanted to cater for the ‘explorer’ and ‘aspirer’ audience label, in particular the ‘explorers’ of large scale audiences who are determined by their young adult age and enjoyment of trying new things- applicable to our horror which we wanted to be viewed as new and original for audiences looking for something more authentic and new to the market than the increasingly popular and generic horrors using young children as the antagonistic villains, or using ideas of monsters and imaginative supernatural- whereas contrastingly we used an old woman, a ghostly spectre rather than something potentially alien and unrealistic. 

We also subverted away from the 21^st century usage of home camera style filming and editing to make filming seem more realistic as we viewed this as tacky in some of our preliminary tasks, this professional way of filming using a tripod, dolly and fig rig hence allowed us to create a more cinematic professional feel to our piece attracting the ‘explorer’ audience profile. In a negative light, by creating a horror production we did however limit audiences diverting away from ‘mainstreamers’ ‘suceeders’ and ‘struggler’ audience classifications less likely to be interested in our media due to their family and respective values not interested in the supernatural and horror. In particular we may have un intentionally aggravated the ‘resigned’ audience profile, this categorisation of audience members inclusive of the elderly, so with our ageing antagonist where her age is what makes her feared could potentially trigger ageism stigmatisation the ‘resigned’ may disagree with.  Using age as the factor that makes our antagonist feared and fitting to horror themes induces ideas of Paul hunts 1991 theory, whereby he suggests the idea of the ‘super cripple’ in media. This super cripple idea is particularly relevant because with the usage of slow camera 180 degree shots tracking the old woman’s movement, as well as her crouched stature and body language in the footage and her ‘crippled’ face and appearance with the usage of makeup, special effects and mise en scene she is conveyed to the audience to adhere to Hunts theory and her flaw and incapability/disability is arguably used for entertainment purposes and conveying the weakness of old age to audiences- viewing this in a negative light.

Our film trailer uses juxtaposing ideas of age- with old age connoting death and horror whereas young age with the young girl is seen to be innocent as our young actor plays the role of the protagonist. Harold Laswell’s hyperdemic needle theory suggests as producers we have the ability to almost ‘inject’ audiences with views ideas and attitudes, influencing passive viewers to accept portrayed ideas we are portraying for entertainment purpose. In particular our coordinating magazine cover for our film uses a large scale close up image of the old lady playing the ghostly spectre in our film to convey ideas of horror through age and also convincingly giving passive audiences ideas that there will be a truth, context and history behind our plot as age is arguably associated with knowledge, experience and knowing- and hence this old woman’s story of horror would be attractive to audiences. Our media product of the magazine also uses intense editing, with special effects and low saturation aperture and filters making the woman appear in a death like state. This hence would appear as stark to audiences that someone appearingly ‘dead’ has been used on the cover of a magazine, hence triggering more interest and tension up build to see the film and get involved with the rest of the marketing campaign- possibly by following the cross media convergence links to social media we have included on the poster and magazine cover.

Our films trailer is structured to use repeated shots and reoccurrence of the old woman in our film, with effectively a final shot of her used to in order to cultivate viewers to have a negative opinion of her, hence understanding our films storyline and conveying the antagonist dominating the plot. This accordingly links to the cultivation theory whereby repetitive exposure to the same message, in this case the old woman would influence attitudes and values passive viewers have. However, despite our aspirations to encourage audiences to understand the messages and motifs in our production and use the repeated exposure and recurrence of the old woman to build an opinion, we agree more with Stuart halls reception theory than the cultivation theory and would aim for audiences to take a ‘negotiated reading/understanding’ approach to our media productions whereby they would take on board certain parts of our media production byt not all of it- so that enigmas and questions can still be made by audiences and they can create their own views, opinions and thoughts and hence be more actively involved in the media. The mind is what creates fear and hence throughout our development and production of our media we wanted to allow audiences to make up their own mind, and be kept in anticipation and be unknowing of what is going to happen in our full length film. Rather than relying simply on our media products, we needed to rely on the human brains of audiences deciphering our film- and hence be aware of what images of graphic, gruesome or disturbing scenes could put audiences in fear. The thalamus in our brains sends information about something we are scared or disturbed by to the sensory cortex, where it is interpreted for meaning and then passed to the hippocampus to establish context, hence leaving it up to the complexity of ones brain to decipher the meaning behind our harrowing images and themes of horror in our trailer, poster and magazine cover would be more effective in cultivating audiences interest in our production.

Our media products inevitably had to be created with intention, to reach a large market with a large purpose. With this in mind we attempted to adhere to as many of blumler and katz uses and gratifications in their ‘uses and gratifications and desires theory’ to incorporate many different reasons audiences should be attracted to consume our media. The idea from the theory ‘to be entertained’ was adhered to through the simple idea that the format of our media was a cinematic production and magazine cover- audiences both reading and visiting the cinema to be entertained. Also the usage of special effects even simplistic effects we incorporated in the trailer such as ghostify-ing the movements of our antagonist and using additive dissolve, flares and orbs would give a more supernatural and diverging from reality feel to our media- hence entertaining to audiences rather than more mundane realistic dramas, documentaries and historical production. ‘to socially interact with others’ was another gratification we took into consideration as we wanted a campaign for our production to reach audiences through word of mouth, as according to statistics this is perhaps one of the most effective ways of marketing and reaching audiences…an example of this being the ‘hobbit’ 2012 campaign or ‘batman dark knight campaign’ where social media platform usage triggered nonstop buzz and discussion for the films, especially as their campaigns used active audience involvement with city hunts to find relics for the batman film and constant tweets and status’ on social media to accumulate a wide audience. Audiences would watch our film to socially interact with others because the trailer too plays on physically gripping ideas audiences would talk about such as our attempt to incorporate claustrophobic themes for our film by filming almost all of it in one house- especially relevant to social discussion and interaction as claustrophobia is the 7^th most common universal phobia. The intense internal feel from watching the trailer with the absence of spacious establishing shots or long shots shows a close proximity to the danger in the film- almost as if audience members are actively involved. ‘To escape from daily troubles and woes’ was one of katz and bulmers theories that we in fact juxtaposing opposed to in our film as we included troublesome and woe some themes such as the fear and horror behind ageing. However, although our mundane plot and themes conveyed through dark imagery used in or our poster and media cover, and our shadow and light contrast in the trailer we in fact created a parallel in our production whereby audiences can escape their troubles and woes by watching something worse and more woeful, which in turn gives a arguable feeling of moral content and grateful emotions to audiences who will potentially be more thankful for their ‘daily troubles and woes’ than experiencing the ‘daily troubles and woes’ the young antagonist does in our film who is troubled by an elderly ghost. This in turn allowed us to let audiences associate and identify with characters and situations, giving a more effective audience appeal.