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Evaluation 5 - Hooking in the Audience

How did you attract/address your audience?

We had a number of influences from films as mentioned in our post named 'Influences'. The ones we mentioned were 'Ramona and Beezus', 'Bridge to Terebithia', 'Shark Boy and Lava Girl/The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl' and 'Justice'.

Ramona and Beezus was a huge influence for our characters. We really wanted them to come off as real and childlike, Ramona is very much like this and therefore become someone we based the character 'Amelia' of off. She has such an overactive imagination that it sometimes comes off as bad but she is just living her childhood to the fullest.
Bridge to Terebithia was a big influence in terms of imagination, this film has a huge emphasis on creativity and learning through play. The main character in the film loves to draw and creates his own world through drawing, this was something we wanted to include, it gives it such a great childhood feel, with imaginative play.
Shark Boy and Lava Girl was another influence for the imaginative side of thngs, the story shows two superhero's in an dreamt up world where they fight different villians. This film also influenced part of the bond in which we wanted to have between our two characters. Although Shark Boy and Lava Girl are not siblings, their relationship is like that and that is something we wanted to come across well in our opening.

In our opening we had a number of genre conventions. We had a voice over, this is helpful in younger kids films. As they may not be able to read yet, it helps them to get the jist of the tone of the films and introduces the characters in a non-complicated way. We also had our main characters who are children introduced almost straight away. This again allows the audience to identify with the characters right from the start, the children can begin to imagine themselves in the story straight away. Another convention was having the production companies at the beginning, this isn't necessarily a convention to just a children's genre but to all the genre's in genreal. There wasn't very many titles in our film (only the two main actors and the film title). This is because in our research we found that not many chilren's films actually include too many. This is most likely due to the fact they have absolutely no interest in reading them and many not even be able to. A final convention was having an establishing shot, this allows our target audience to find out where the film is set. It shows they straight away that we are in a park, this typically being where chldren play etc.

The music we chose was very upbeat and happy. It makes our audience feel comfortable, due to the age rating we wouldn't want to children to be tense. It just had to be able to help the story flow along and be in the background from our voice over. We chose the music as we believed it would be good to fit in with our opening and the genre, there wasn't a huge amount that we liked on the website we used for non-copyrighted sound but these were the ones we thought would be best.

The unique selling point of our film is imagination, there are not many films these days that are live-action and have an emphasis on imagination. They are normally more likely to be animated. Our opening being live-action gives the imaginative side of a things a bigger sense of realism to our audience. The children watching came identify more with the characters, putting themselves in Amelia and Henry's shoes allowing them to feel part of their imagination.


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