Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

 

We decided that the target audience for our media product would be teenagers and they would be mostly male. We decided this from the feedback to our questionnaires because the psychological sub-genre of thrillers was said to be a popular one, especially among teenagers. So we thought that by creating a psychological thriller we would have a clear target audience that we would be aiming towards during the whole process. Also males tend to prefer thrillers in comparison to females who tend to prefer more thoughtful films that are not violent. However I do think that our opening would be enjoyed by some girls as well because there are elements of it that would appeal to them, for example the female lead that they can empathise with and relate to.

Target Audience Profile

We researched our audience by giving questionnaires to various people, but mostly those of this age range who have these interests. We found out what they are interested in and what they expect in a thriller. We asked this age group because most of the people that the three of us spend time with and know a lot about are teenagers or people in their early twenties. Also, as the three of us fall into this target group we would know what would be appealing. I think that the questionnaires were an effective way of finding out the information we needed because we could ask all of the necessary questions and people could have time to think about their answers.

Another method of research we used to find out about our target audience was by showing story boards to people who fitted into this target group and showing rough cuts of the film to them as well. This was also helpful because from this we would receive feedback about whether they thought the film was heading in the right direction and if it would be appealing to them. We made changes where they thought it would be necessary and we got positive comments also so we knew what was going well.



From our audience research, we learnt a lot about what their expectations were of the psychological thriller. We found out from the questionnaires that people expected the plot to have a twist in and they must be eerie and full of tension. They also said that there should not be many characters and not much dialogue in the opening, but that there should be tense music. A preference of theirs was to have props that could cause danger in the plot, like weapons. The props that turned out to be most popular in the questionnaire suggested that our target audience is attracted by films with plenty of blood and gore.

In my opinion, our movie would fall into the 12 age certificate from looking at the BBFC guidelines. The only aspect of our opening that may be questionable in suitability for an audience would be the violence. The guidelines for the violence in a 12 film states that ‘moderate violence is allowed but should not dwell on detail’. I think our film would fit well into the criteria because the violence is not in too much detail. In the shot where we see the girl was wounded by the bullet, you do not actually see the injury because it’s covered by the girl’s hands. All the viewer can see is blood around it. Wounds also cannot be seen in the images of the dead bodies, just blood and by the BBFC guidelines it is acceptable to have ‘occasional gory moments’. This may impact which age group would watch our film. The intended age group of the viewers of our film was going to be from 16-25 but it may harder to get people of this age to watch it if they see it is of the 12 certificate. However this may also broaden our target audience because it would appeal to a younger age range as well as our intended group.