Q5: How Did You Attract/Address Your Audience?

We attracted our audience in many ways. We had a female and a male main character to attract to both genders, with the 'gang/street' side of the narrative attracting mainly males, and the underlying love and attraction between the two characters attracting mainly to the female audience.

We created a hermeneutic code in the opening to leave the audience wanting more, by leaving unanswered questions to do with the third and fourth character in the narrative, as well as the background between the two main characters- is there an underlying attraction? Creating this foreshadowing both leaves the audience wanting more and actively engages the audience in the movie by making them think for themselves to piece together the puzzle, making the audience-movie relationship stronger and consequently making the audience more actively enjoy the movie.

The hermeneutic code for the third and fourth characters are created first by using a blurred camera shot to blur the third character during the drug exchange. This blurring of the shot creates a confusion as to the character being a big part of the story, and the fact that he doesn't have any dialogue adds to the confusion. The fourth character has two lines of dialogue, which themselves are very vague anyway, leaving the audience wondering if there is more of a connection between these two characters.

We also created a seme (semic code) in the cultural stereotype of the two characters (Ali's/Ceaser's generic clothing and slang; Kirsty's/Flo's generic clothing and setting) so the audience would create assumptions about the characters and build up their own representations, which would then be challenged as the movie progressed. Using these conventions to create a seme means that we could effectively 'show, not tell' the audience about the characters.

Ali's conventional 'youth' clothes

Kirsty's conventional middle class clothes

We used the age of our actors to relate to our target audience- the target audience is young, our actors are young.

Young Actors to relate to young audience

The non-diagetic music enhances the codes we have created by being generic to the culture of the main male character. The music is of the hip hop/rap genre, which is very popular with the youth that we are portraying in our movie.



Music has a big effect on most people, especially youths. Hopefully our choice of music would address and attract more of an audience, especially in the youth class.


Our use of props relating to our characters and their background stories enhances the stories of the characters and also enhances the conventions and codes of the stereotypes we are trying to both conform to and challenge. A list of related props includes:

• Drugs
• Chain (accessories)
• Headphones
• Bag with Nike tick visible
• Phone
• Breakfast Cereal

 The male characters props (chain, bag, drugs) enhance his character stereotype as an unruly youth. The drugs show a bad side to him and immediately associate him with the 'street/gangs' culture. This gives the audience an immediate image of the male character.
The female characters props (headphones, breakfast cereal, phone) represents her as a female with more money- the phone and headphones being expensive commodities and the breakfast cereal showing that she has time and is relaxed. This gives the audience a representation of her being relaxed and at least slightly wealthy. The headphones also enhance the music side of the movie.

The location of our film (for the opening two minutes, mostly a school) is easily connectable to our target audience (15 and over) as most of our audience will be currently going through school or have left relatively recently.