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

During the research and planning stage before our production, we interviewed a likely member of

our target audience, Mr Healey, on his opinions and attitudes on our genre and the genres of other

films, TV show and music styles. From the results of the interview, we found that film noir was rated

quite highly in his genre preferences, as he prefers the sense of style and the common plot themes.

During the interview, we questioned Mr Healey on him how high he would

rate film noir as a film genre, elements or conventions of the genre he

enjoyed seeing, and his generic preferences in film (i.e. what generic film

conventions interest him, and which don’t). We asked him on his likes and

dislikes in terms of different film, TV and music styles, and why he preferred

them to others.

Questions asked during interview:

What do you like seeing in a Noir film?

Which character stereotypes do you prefer?

Which Noir films would you consider you’re favourite and why?

Are there certain sub-genres that you would prefer?

Are there any favourite actors you have from watching Noir films?

What are you bored of seeing in a Noir film?

What signs would you associate with a Noir film?

What would you prefer to see more in a Noir film, the action side or the romance side?

The results were that he enjoys noir films due to their focus on story and plot, as well as character

development as an important part of the film. His likes for music are jazz, mixed with a techno

aspect (an example given was in The Matrix) because this allows to add tension to the atmosphere

and blend in aspects of both modern and old. His likes for both TV and film, were mainly detective

stories including deduction and emphasis on story, along with adventure films (examples include

Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones).

For his dislikes, a few of the music styles that were not rated very

highly in his opinion include pop and R&B, both being more

modern music styles. In terms of film and TV, he especially hates

any segment of the story that has no relevance to the plot (i.e.

including romance or love between characters when it is not

significant to the story), or that does not seem in any way

realistic (examples include most horror films such as Paranormal

Activity and Scream).

This helped when planning on how we would attract and address our audiences, as

we had now gained some idea of what they would want to see in a noir film. Some of the

conventions that the audience would want to see included in our film were the classical black and

white style film, jazz music to create the right atmosphere etc. We also gained an idea of what we

would want to stay away from including so as to avoid them becoming uninterested, including

love/romance that has no purpose to the story and anything in the film that does not seem realistic.

In our film, we obviously had to use different elements/conventions that we believe would attract

and interest our target audience. The main thing that we thought would interest fans of noir films,

would generally be the return of noir itself as it is a nearly extinct genre, which will bring a new story

and hopefully gather an eager audience. Other things that would intrigue the audience would mainly

be the conventions of the noir genre, including: black and white film (classic noir convention),

emphasis on characterisation (focusing on Dawson), and enigma created (unsolvable case and

mysterious murderer).

From the interview with Mr

Healey, we also gathered an

idea of how we could promote

or advertise our film. From the

information given, it is safe to

assume that our audience would be fans and regular viewers of detective shows featuring

deductions. This would allow for us to use ad breaks between these shows to show and

advertisement or trailer for our film, appealing directly to our audience. Other methods of

advertisement may include broadcasting an advert through radio, featuring a trailer in cinemas or

hanging posters around local areas where most of our audience or any other potential audiences will

be.