R + P Post 5: How we plan to attract/address our target audience

In order to attract our target audience, our film must be able to be both entertaining and relatable to our target audience of the LGBTQ+ community.

In order to make our film as relatable as possible, we wanted to give the film a very authentic feel. Therefore we wanted to portray characters and events in a very true to life fashion. To achieve this we discussed most of our ideas with a small focus group of 4 to 5 gay, lesbian and bisexual 17 and 18 year olds in order to have them critique our ideas. One area of our production that I feel greatly benefited from this process was our script. We thought it was very important that the monologue given by our gay protagonist was not overly stereotypical and would portray the feelings of a true gay person in a non-belittling manner. This is obviously difficult for our group to achieve seeing as none of us are gay, however through a combination of help from our focus group, critique from the rest of our group and hardwork from Olamide, the script and more specifically the monologue was completed to what I feel is a very high standard. 

A notable element from the piece is when David recieves abuse for his sexual orientation. This is something which I believe every member of the gay community would understand, either from their own experiences or from those of people around them. Nearly 2 in 5 gay men admit to having been bullied due to their sexuality. It was integral to us that this sequence did not glorify such disgusting actions, but instead taught the audience what it was like to be on the recieving end of abuse and it was important to us that although this moment has a mildly comedic element, the bully is still shown in a bad light. I think the script was very important in portraying the bully's actions as wrong and I believe this definitely made our piece more relatable to the gay community.

We also felt our sequence had to be entertaining to watch, as this is extremely common for fictional cinema to achieve in order to be successful. Therefore, we felt it would be important to have both a heart-warming and witty moment in our opening. Again we felt this would be best achieved through the character of Craig and more specifically through the voice over. For our heart-warming moment, we thought this would be easiest to accomplish in the introduction of Craig, when he is delving into his inner working principles. By portraying him as an introvert and awkward character it makes him both pityable and also cute. For our comedic moment, we felt the freeze frame before the punch would make for a "chuckle worthy" moment just before the audience again feels pity for Craig due to him being punched. Such portrayals are often found in our genre of film and would appeal to the audiences softer side. Richard Ayoyade's and Craig Robert's interview with BBC breakfast on the 18th of March 2011 heavily inspired this need to include such "agonising moments" within our own piece as it is partly what made Submarine such a fun film to watch.