Evaluation Question 5 : How did you attract/address your audience?

The Uses and Gratifications Theory
The uses and gratifications theory dictates that members of an audience who consume the media are active. This means they actively seek out and choose media to consume, however different members of the audience will use and find pleasure from the media for different reasons. 
These four main reasons are:

• Social Interaction
• Entertainment and Escapism
• Personal Identification
• Information

Below I have included a Google Slides presentation discussing how each of these parts of the uses and gratifications theory relate to our production, aglet.

Expectations of the Audience

Contemplative Craig

The audience will also have certain pre-concieved expectations from a film opening, from a Coming of Age film, from an LGBTQ+ film, from teenage characters, etc. and when planning and creating the opening for aglet, we had to bear these in mind in order to effectively entertain our audience through manipulating these expectations and conventions. For example, the main narrative of aglet should be about gay culture and should portray it in a realistic  or positive manner, as the film is an LGBTQ+ film and the audience may be disappointed, or feel alienated if the film does  not  achieve this with the given themes. Therefore in aglet we were very careful to maintain a true to life portrayal of gay men and sought lots of feedback from our gay peers on  how these characters should be represented. From the beginning we wanted to have one effeminate gay male and one more reserved gay male to argue against the stereotype that all gay men are archetypally camp.We clearly  showed David as camp through his dress and hair style, which is stereo-typically camp and Craig to be more reserved through his contemplative and quiet mannerisms, such as writing in the notebook.

David harassed for his effeminacy

We also had to pay a lot of attention to continuity techniques, as using them would help us create  the effects of one "continuous piece of media language prose" that would flow and allows the audience to suspend their disbelief and be pulled into the story, as if it were reality. This often means  the audience are more immersed in the piece and get more joy out of the film. Immersion is often achieved by hollywood film studios through expensive IMAX and 3D screenings, however as we are only a small indie film production company we must utilize cinematographical skills, such as continuity theory. A good example of us using continuity theory would be our use of match-on-action in the breakfast sequence. Here we showed one section of time from many different angles to make it interesting to watch, however to give the impression that no time is skipped, filmic time has to match real world time, so Craig's actions must match from one shot to another. This is match on action.

The Breakfast Continuity Sequence

Audience Reactions
After producing the opening sequence to aglet, we thought it would be an interesting learning experience if we heard back from our target audience about aglet. Below I have produced a haiku deck picking out some common themes from our audience feedback. I personally am very happy with how our audience react, as it is similar to how you would expect an audience to react to a Coming of Age film. I also think its positive that they do not often mention the characterization of Craig or David, because it means that Craig and David seem like normal and realistic portrayals of young gay men, which is exactly what we wanted as a group.

Also, during our production and post production stages we received alot of critique about many aspects of our production, some that were in our control (and thus were fixed) and others that we simply did not have the time or resources to fix. These include:

• The punch was not close enough
• The bullies were not threatening enough
• The conflict warranted a change of music, not the complete stop of music

The first two bullet points come down to casting. We found it very difficult to find people who were both willing to act, but were also threatening looking people. This was made even more difficult as we wanted both a male and female bully, to get better gender representation in the opening sequence. Had we perhaps had a production budget that had allowed us to hire actors, these issues could have been negated, yet alas this was completely out of the scope of our production. We could maybe have hidden the punch better by showing it from a different angle, but we did not get any good takes of the punch from any other angle and so we were forced to use this one. The second bullet point we may have been able to tackle had we had more time, as producing the sound tracks for our piece was very time consuming. However, we were already pushed for time when we received this critique and although we agreed it would have improved our piece, we felt that the time would be better spent elsewhere, than creating a whole new second song for our soundtrack.