We chose our actor (Callum Ruddleston) because one could certainly say that he is attractive so would attract young girls and possibly older girls too to the film. We had also modelled our main role on Ryan Gosling's role in Drive and Callum looks quite like Ryan Gosling so this degree of familiarity may further draw audiences in.
The visual mood of the film opening and its cold colour palette suggests a steely, serious, gritty element to the film. The close ups of the main character makes the audience focus on the main character and sympathise with what he's going through and the decisions he has to make.
The synth-based soundtrack suggests that the setting of the film is modern and possibly dystopian. It is slow and brooding and slowly builds tension. The modernism of the synthy soundtrack should relate to our young target audience and connect with contemporary music trends.
Here is a focus interview I conducted to gain some feedback on how we attracted and addressed our audience:
Narrative + Genre
From the questionnaire, the clearest things established to us were the similar media products to ours – three titles repeatedly cropping up were Drive, Collateral and the Bourne films. It was also suggested from the questionnaire that most people seemed to understand the story behind our film and they saw it as either a suspense thriller or a crime thriller – which we also saw this film as.
The fact that the crime and suspense aspects of the story were the main aspects that reached through to our audience suggests that they saw it mainly as a genre film like, for example, Drive and Collateral. Both of these films are notable for not using exposition in their opening. The opening of Drive, for example, sees the main character beginning a getaway mission while in our film it sees our character beginning his assassination mission. In Collateral, the film begins with the main character as he is leaving LAX airport without an explanation – our film echoes this in the sense that when our main character moves from A to B it is not immediately explained why. Both these films also have strong stylistics and aesthetics – in the opening scenes of both, wide shots of the Los Angeles skyline are frequently used to establish the location as they focus on immersing the audience in the location rather than following generic plot conventions – and our product followed suit, introducing the film with a river view of London. In this way, we have blended escapism – as we follow a suspenseful and dramatic narrative – with realism, as we are immersing our audiences in what are most likely to be familiar locations to them.
The general narrative of the opening scene is straightforward though one or two of our viewers felt that it moved quickly and they were pushed to keep up - this feedback is not totally worrying to us, however, as it was our intention to put the audience in the middle of the story and not focus on story exposition. The possible consequence of this – that the audience have found the film simply confusing – has, we feel, been avoided, as the majority of feedback to our film was positive in the narrative aspect.
We drew upon the influence of actors such as Ryan Gosling when it came to casting and creating our main character, feeling that an actor like him would have widespread appeal to the age bracket that we were marketing this film at.
Our story mainly involves fairly young characters who would appeal to audiences within the 15-25 age bracket as we wanted our audience to be attracted to it through personal identification. Feeling that the personal identification theory would be a good way of appealing to our audiences, we also casted an actor to play the girl who is killed who is the same age as the people we are marketing this film to as we felt that we wanted the characters to be relatable to a teenage/young adult audience. Part of our opening relied on a shock factor to draw in viewers, and so we felt that killing of a girl of a fairly young age would be an adequate way of doing so. This is the aspect of the story that we feel may have led to all the comparisons our film received – to Drive, Collateral and the Bourne films – as the violence/action in each of them is generally unexpected, surprising and shocking. In Drive, one of the main female characters is one of the first people to be killed in the film, while in Collateral the entire third act revolves around a woman in danger. In The Bourne Supremacy, the main female character of the first film in the series is killed in the opening scene.
