In order to attract your audience, you first need to know what it is that will attract them. As for our film this was a very simple task because the target audience we had intended for our film was an age range that we fit inside. Since we knew exactly what would attract us, when it came around to pre-production and preparing ideas of what we need to add so it will appeal to our audience was a simple task.
Below are some examples of the ideas we encorperated into the film in order to attract our audience demographic.
Firstly, our choice in actress. Looking back on research into the victims of thrillers, those which contain female victims almost always have an attract female blonde playing the lead role. An exmaple of this can be seen in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds".
As you can see in the image to the right, we have a blonde and attractive woman playing the lead role.
This use of an attractive blonde actress has been implemented to attract a large male audience.
Another method, this time to try and attract more female audience members is to add some kind of relationship based storyline, or something that could be based on real life. By adding for example, a romantic scene involving a lead male and female character may attract a small amount of female audience members willing to watch the film. This is exactly what we did to our film. In order to widen our male dominated demographic we added a relationship "on rough ground" in the hope that teenage girls may sympathise with the girl in the scene as they themselves may have had similar experiences.
On top of these there is also the use of modern technology. Youth today have grown up surrounded by the ever expanding world of technology and it has now earned our generation the title "Technological Natives". And this term is very correct, having grown up in a world where one second it is DVD and the next it is Blue Ray we have grown accustom to the changes in technology and we see it as the norm. In our film we added a hidden context to the piece by involving a "new" mobile phone. The message being "Be careful who you talk to and to be careful about who give your mobile number to". Because we use a "new" mobile phone, the audience are more likely to pick up on the hidden context.