How did you attract/address your audience?

The dictionary defines the term 'thriller' as "an exciting, suspenseful play or story, esp. a mystery story" and during the production of our thriller influenced opening sequence we made sure that we kept to that definition by using a number of techniques with the aid of the equipment and editing capabilities available. One example of this technique was how we deliberately withheld the facial identity of the character in the suit (known to our group as the 'Mystery Man'). We purposely withheld the Mystery Man's facial identity throughout the whole sequence by using the camera and the objects around us. With the camera we filmed parts (such as his shoes - [we used a high angle shot for this] and chest) of the Mystery Man's body but we were careful to reveal his face. Using this technique allowed us to introduce the character to the sequence but it also allowed us not to show his full identity which meant that we kept in line with the definition of the thriller genre as it was suspenseful and exciting since the audience would be trying to figure out as to who that character was. Also, the Mystery Man appears in the first 1o seconds of the sequence beginning, meaning that the character's secrecy would attract the audience's attention. Another thing we did to develop the character's secrecy was to add footsteps as he made his way to the interrogation room. As the Mystery Man was advancing (we presented his journey through a series of short clips as there was more than one narrative - this was parallel editing) to the interrogation room, we added dramatic, loud and urgent non-diegetic footsteps to show that he was in a hurry to get to the interrogation room - this would have made the audience question his urgency thus stimulating their curiosity.

Through our editing we were able to deliver the conventions of the thriller genre by using an effect called 'blur'. Blur is an effect that causes scenes to become blurred. With blur we used it to blur out two pivotal scenes of our sequence. In the first scene (which was a point of view shot) blur was used to convey the character's disorientated feelings and as well as to disguise the character's location (to add a sense of mystery). However, in the second scene (a two shot) we used blur for the sole purpose of concealing the identities and actions of the two characters. The mise en scene created by the effect of blur was needed for our sequence because in order to keep in line with the conventions of the thriller genre we had to develop a few layers of mystery throughout to keep provoking and increasing the audience's interest.

As mentioned before we used parallel editing in the sequence. The main reason we introduced more than one narrative to our sequence was so that the audience wouldn't express discontent towards to the sequence. If we had not used parallel editing (e.g. in the sequence there's more than one narrative occurring) then it's likely that our audience would have lost interest due to the lack of narrative action i.e. having just one story would have made the sequence stale. The way we implemented parallel editing was through: the scenes in the interrogation room, the suspicious-looking character waiting by the woodlands, flashbacks/references to the victim-character's situation and the Mystery Man making his way to the interrogation room. The use of parallel editing was how we addressed our target audience of 15-25 yr olds (15-25 yr olds like complicated/active narratives and are able to keep up with them whereas older and younger audiences may have trouble keeping up with the events in the sequence).