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

ORIGINALLY LARGER- WRITING EASIER TO READ

Most film posters depict the faces of the actors or characters who play a prominent role in the film. However, we decided that was to typical and instead used a simple headstone in a graveyard. We thought that this would leave the audience more interested and wouldn't give away too much of the plot itself. It does however indicate, even if only subtly, the genre of the film.

We decided to keep our poster simple so not to detract from the plot of our film. Our poster was inspired by Arthaus in its style, and uses a font that combines  elements of Cassandre's 1937 Peignot  and the Broadway font, creating a Gothic font that almost mirror that originally on the gravestone (R I P), indicating to our audience that the film is of a Gothic nature. The photograph for the background was taken in the graveyard where we filmed our movie, the outcome of the being something of a personal nature to the audience, they see a film of an event occurring after having seen the poster. We decided to make the picture black and white to keep within the conventions of old Gothic Horrors. Overall, the choices we made were in order to attract our audience, inform them of the genre and create an original, non-typical poster.

Below are the questions and interviews we conducted with our audience.

Questions for our audience: If given the chance would you like to see more of the film?
Is there anything you think would improve the film?
Is there anything you find confusing?
Was there anything you didn't like or found distasteful?
Do you relate to the film?
Do you think it fits with the conventions of a gothic horror film?
Did the poster attract you to see the film?
What did you think of the colour scheme and the music?

From these responses, we can see that, generally, people find it interesting and would like to see more of it. However, they believed that we should work on our editing as they found that our opening titles were too fast and that the other titles did not fit as well as the others did. Understandable as this is, it was difficult to film the writing of the calligraphy, due to the hand being in the way, but that is no real excuse. It did have to be sped up, as it takes a while to write, if it is meant to be clean and sharp. Our interviewees also found that the lighting in the final coffin sequence was appropriate, with which we agree. It was a difficult scene to film and we had to simply suffice with a torch in a cupboard. We would have used a more inventive and imaginative approach if we hadn't been under a time limit with no budget. Our interviewees generally agreed, with one objection, that the colour scheme matched the atmosphere of the film. An objection was raised was that it needed to be darker, but I find that if it were darker, some shapes might have become indistinguishable. We had decided to keep the film in black and white and at that level of contrast in order to keep within one of the main conventions of Gothic Horror. The one question where most agreed (negatively) was on whether or not they could relate to the film. I believe they may have partially misunderstood the question (I personally do not know many people who have been buried alive). Its actual line of enquiry was whether or not they felt that they had a connection in general to the film, not if they had had a similar experience. The interviews also showed that our poster was effective in attracting our target audience- it fulfilled its purpose.