Evaluation: Question 5

How did you attract or address your audience?

In order to address and attract our audience, Adam and I included a variety of cues and conventions which our young adult demographic would be able to identify with, combined with some concepts they would rally against, instead. This manifested predominantly in our choices of cast, action, costume, setting and soundtrack.

The characters' clothes in this opening sequence were amongst the most vital components of both their personality and relatability. Whereas Mal, the girl from our planet, wears the casual, average clothes one would expect of a teenager forced to live on the streets (comfortable hiking boots, a warm coat, jeans), Al's costume was designed specifically to be strange in terms of both its unsuitability to the weather and its jarring style and colour. This would hopefully create a ripple in our young adult audience in terms of forcing them to ask themselves who and for what purpose would dress as strangely and uncomfortably as her, therefore hinting at her extraterrestrial origins. The perception of Al as weird and Other is understandably one of the core concepts of our film; the viewers are supposed to relate to the both physically and metaphorically more human Mal, up to the point when Al's characterisation develops enough for her to be accepted by them as well.

In terms of this, our choice of cast was also important; the leads had to be representative of our target audience to allow greater identification, making the contrast of Al's behaviour greater. We also did this in order to go against certain annoying stereotypes forced upon female heroines in many sci-fi and thriller films (such as their status as damsels in distress, or their characterisation as two-dimensional as opposed to humanly flawed, individualistic and generally well-rounded).

The setting and choice of action in the case of our film go hand in hand to an extent in attracting our audience. The bedroom of the girl whose identity Al has stolen, in particular, would have hopefully appealed to our viewers due to the variety of pop culture references present in the posters on the walls (including the Batman and Superman logos). Al's strange speech pattern and behaviour, however, would conversely have hopefully alerted them to the fact that something didn't make sense about someone being so well-acquainted with our world and yet unable to interact successfully with others (in fact, this behaviour may instead be seen as a comment on the mental state of a lot of teenagers).

The fact that a character of our audience's age commits a crime in this sequence is also resonant of the stereotypically perceived need found in most young adults to rebel or transgress authority and rules, hopefully adding a higher degree of excitement to the narrative. Similarly, the fact that the action begins in a large but mostly unidentifiable city hopefully brings it closer to home for certain viewers, allowing them to imagine it's occurring somewhere near them and lending a sense of immediacy to the plot.

The final component of our address of our audience was the acoustic guitar soundtrack we used to help establish our film as part of the indie genre. The lyrics version would have arguably been more apt in communicating such an atmosphere, but I digress. The guitar line, being fairly simple and easy to duplicate, would hopefully inspire an element of fan imitation, as many viewers of indie films are statistically partial to playing guitar themselves. The cultural relevancy of this instrument, therefore, would hopefully bolster our audience's ability to relate to and immerse themselves in the story.

In conclusion, we attracted and addressed the audience of our film via attempting to appeal to the socio-cultural layer our film is targeted at due to its indie sci-fi thriller genre, as well as by making our characters as relatable to our chosen age bracket as possible. All this would hopefully allow our audience to feel almost part of the story in terms of feeling that the events of the film could happen to any average person on earth; even them.

DY