Evaluation question 5How did you attract/address your audience?

How Does Your Thriller Hold the Audiences Attention?

Our thriller holds our audiences attention in many ways. An example of some of these ways are because of the use of conventional thriller techniques that were used in our film such as:

McGuffin Red Herring Suspense Cliff Hanger Plot

Antagonist Setting Hero/Main Character

Here are examples of each of these techniques that we have used in our film in order to grab audiences attention:

We did in fact use a McGuffin in our thriller. A McGuffin is something that the people in the film care a lot about that the audience isn't really too focused on. The McGuffin in our finished thriller is the young woman's handbag as we see that there is clearly something very important in this handbag that the mugger may want as he even takes the USB out of it and lugs it into a laptop to look for something on the usb. However it isn't exactly what the audience is focusing on the first time they watch it, they are more focused on whether the dog is going to catch him and what is ultimately going to happen/ what he will achieve from this.

Another thriller technique that we used in our thriller is a Red Herring. A red herring is something that the audience is tricked into thinking will happen when really something entirely different is going to happen. an example of this in our thriller is the fact of the mugger. By this I mean that the mugger stole the bag and got into her car so the audience assume that he is in fact the antagonist in all of this and overall the bad guy when really right at the end we see that the bad guys was actually the helpless young woman after all as we see the mugger get brutally strangles by an assassin that we suspect she hired at the end of the film.

Our thriller also contains a few extracts of suspense, a few examples of this are the dog chase scenes where we see the dog chasing the mugger. This builds tension In the viewer as they are constantly thinking “is he going to get away from the dog or is the dog going to catch him!?” Another example of suspense building in out film is that of the muggers death scene in the car. This is because it drags on for a good 15 seconds with lot of struggling going on to kill the mugger, this is constantly making us question whether he is actually going to die or do something amazing to put the switch on the assassin?

There is also a cliff hanger at the very end of our film. A cliffhanger is something that happens at the end of a clip that makes you question what is going to happen next? Therefore almost forcing you to watch the next episode in order to find out what will happen next. Our example of this is right at the end of the film where we hear Alex say down her phone “ye….its done” this happened right after the muggers death scene and this is in fact what makes us question “did she do it?” “was she the one that planned this all along!?” therefore making the audience question what will happen and watching more to see if they were right, this is part of why people will want to watch the rest of our film.

Plot: The plot in a thriller is one of the main aspects on what makes the thriller good or bad. The plot is basically the storyline, without an effective storyline/plot the audience will begin to get frustrated with the fact that their favorite show/film doesn’t make sense which will drive audiences away. The plot in our film follows an easy to follow line; mugger steals girls bag for important object inside bag, girls dog chases mugger, mugger gets in victims car and hooks up important object to her laptop, mugger sees his face on “hit list” in laptop, gets killed by assassin in the back of the car, victim turn out to be antagonist the entire time.

Antagonist: An antagonist in a film is basically the villain/ enemy of the main character, the one who makes everything go wrong for who we think is the main character. In our case we have a female antagonist which is unusual for the thriller genre as females are normally used as sidekicks of some kind to the main villains. Another special feature about the antagonist in our film is the fact that at the start of the film she is indeed the victim, it is a lot twist we see at the end that tells us that she has in fact been the antagonist the entire time.

Setting: the setting of the thriller must be appropriate for the type of thriller in which it is, for example a police thriller would not be set in a jungle as it does not makes sense to the plot. This is Why we made sure that our thriller has the appropriate setting of a public park because it is a secluded setting for someone to get jumped in our film as well as the fact that where else would you walk a dog?

Our Audience FeedbackWe did two audience feedbacks on our film, one being on the rough cut of the film we had

and one being on the final finished product.

For the rough cut there were already quite a lot of mistakes in the film that we were aware of and knew that we were going to go back and change them anyway, Our target audience picked up on some of these faults in the film for example, we broke the 180 degree rule on one of the running scenes without realizing it when we were filming the film. As well as this the majority of the faults were to do with the continuity editing of the film, this is because at the end scene (”the car scene”) there were a lot of point in the replay of the film where we left certain doors open to put the camera for a shot and forgot to close them so in between scenes the doors are constantly switching between open and closed without any of the characters even touching them. However other than these faults they stated that they liked the film “especially the fact that you managed to get a dog in the film without it acting up, it worked really well!”. The storyline was also a factor on something we needed to fix on the film as well as we accidentally missed out a few key scenes that without them the story line does not make sense. But we corrected this when we re recorded this scene for the final cut.

As for the audience review of the final cut of our film, we asked two random people form our class who have never seen our film before questions on what they thought of our film and the different aspects of it. Both responses were near enough the same, they enjoyed the film and the fact that we managed to get a dog a good leading role in the film and got it to stay controlled on the set. As well as the fact that the story line unfolded very well and they liked the twist at the end. And finally they thought we did the cinematic shots in the beginning of the film and for the chase scenes very very well, taking special note of how much they enjoyed the mono pod shot at the beginning.