Practice essay

We created a short film named Countdown. It had the hybrid genre of a romantic-thriller. Katz and Blumler’s uses and gratifications theory can be applied to our film because the primary purpose of our film is to entertain. The audience experience diversion and a sense of escapism whilst interpreting the film into their own life experiences. They can emotionally relate to the film. The two characters in our film have a relationship where they are boyfriend and girlfriend who co-habit. The audience may be in a similar situation. As the film progresses the audience get a sense of expectation that the boy (Peter) will act violently towards his girlfriend due to his obsessive behavior. The audience may pick up on some of his actions and question whether their situation at home could be in any way similar. This is an example of surveillance because the audience use a cognitive approach to interpret the situation personally.

Via the use of the Internet and using primary research such as creating a questionnaire, which we gave out to our target audience, we were able get an idea as to what the audience expectations were. The main genre of our film is Thriller but has a dual genre of romance within the twist at the end. Pearl and Dean said that there were core mainstream audiences and we found that these were categorized via common themes. The audience was our main focus when creating the film as to create the aspirational genre we needed to fulfill audience expectations. Our audience was people who enjoy watching short films and were between the ages of 16-23.

When we presented our finished product to our audience we received a lot of positive feedback as well as areas that could be improved upon. The audience said they understood the genre and they gained a sense of expectation. They were shocked by the romantic twist at the end because they expected the narrative was going to result in a violent attack against the girl. The audience liked this twist because it was unexpected. Areas to improve would be a few of the shots, as they seemed to be slightly out of focus. We may also cut some clips a little shorter, which will decrease the overall length of our short film. 
We have exhibited our short film onto YouTube where people who enjoy watching short films can watch and enjoy it.