Are Your Audience in Your Film?
Are you thinking about your audience’s journey through your story, or are you so absorbed by writing the screenplay that you’ve forgotten about them?
If you fall into that second camp, then this is your timely reminder to begin the process of thinking through your audience’s journey.
What does the audience know and when? This is a mighty question. Manipulating where you put your audience in your film can radically transform your audience’s experience of it.
Through the duration of a film you can shift the audiences knowledge-perspective back and forth. Putting this complexity aside let’s explore the dramatic value of this potent variable.
-The Audience Knows Less than the Protagonist.
If your audience doesn’t fully understand what’s happening until the end, but they are invested enough to stay the distance then well done you! You’ve created intrigue. If in the final instance you pull the pieces together in a reveal you’ve created an ‘a ha’ moment (no, not the 80’s Norwegian pop band). ‘The Usual Suspects’, revolved around one question, “Who is Keyser Söze?” We were playing catch-up; we guessed, questioned and interpreted. What’s the upside of getting your audience to do that? They are now active participants in your film rather than passive observers. The experience and the memory of the film will stay with them.
-The Audience Learns What the Protagonist Learns as the Protagonist Discovers it.
If you want to cement your audience’s relationship with your protagonist, then this could be the technique for you. The emotional and intellectual journey of the audience closely maps that of the protagonist. In M. Night Syamalan’s ‘The Visit’, a brother and sister learn of an incredible case of mistaken identity that puts them in immediate jeopardy. It’s an entirely absorbing moment of dread heightened by the immediacy of our relationship with what’s happening as it’s happening.
-The Audience Knows More than the Protagonist.
‘He’s behind you!’ As they shout in British pantomimes. If your audience has privileged access to information that the protagonist doesn’t have, good for you! You’ve created suspense. Commonly used in thrillers and horrors to the extent that it has become a trope, suspense is a versatile tool and can just as readily find a place in comic or dramatic work where it might be called dramatic irony. In ‘Monster’s Inc’ Sully loses Boo who is dressed in a monster outfit. When he sees the eye of the monster outfit in the rubbish chute and then sees that rubbish crushed and cubed. He believes Boo is dead and faints several times. What the audience knows however is that Boo climbed out of the trash-can and wandered off safely. The comedy is created by us enjoying Sully’s pain whilst safe in the knowledge that Boo is unharmed.
Have a play with -what your audience knows and when- a powerful tool that tightens the dramatic screws.
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