Evaluation: Audience

Who would be the audience of your media product and why? and how did you attract/address your audience?

How did you attract/address your audience? Whilst conducting research in our planning we found out that most horror films were rated 15+. We decided to rate our film a 15 because we had to take into consideration of our target audience.  A film rated a 15 means no one under the age of 15 is classified to watch the movie. Things shown in a 15 movie include:  Strong violence, frequent strong language, drug taking or discriminate language or behaviour. We conducted a questionnaire to find out what attracted our audience to our film and these were the results. From the questionnaire I carried out, I can tell that 99% said they thought the target audience was a rating of 15. This means that we have addressed our audience right.  Also we were able to identify that the audience were attracted mostly by the soundtrack and different shot sizes and transitions moving in and out of a blurred effect. However some were not to keen on the title being as engaging as they thought it would be.

Who would be your audience for your media product? As a group we also considered the use of the camera as this element is very important for attracting and addressing the audience. We decided that we wanted to use a range of camera angles to ensure a range in our opening. we wanted to use a point of view as this angle encourages the audience to sympathize with the protagonist and hopefully understand his situation. The aim of a horror is to play with the audiences mind. I feel that we have achieved this. I think that it would appeal more to a female audience, mainly teenage girls. This is because they can easily relate to the character and place themselves in the protagonists shoes. We decided as a group that our target audience would be between the ages of 15 and 20 as this age range is most likely to watch our production. Although this is the aim, the social group may stretch to attract other viewers of different ages and genders as well, as not everyone has the same film taste. I feel that both genders will sympathise with the protagonist as she is young and vulnerable but at the same time plays the evil character in the film.

Personally I think that by having a female character who is in power is a good idea as she is not presented as a typical female stereotype. Therefore because there is a twist of characters playing opposite roles, means that a larger audience of male and females will want to watch something different that doesn't follow an average plot of a horror film where a man plays the evil character and the women is a genuine lovely girl.  Our male character is also older than the female and this could suggest a wider male audience that can relate to him as a ‘adult’.

In my opinion, I think the target audience we choose worked well as from the feedback we were given from our focus group shows that we achieved our goal of attracting the audience of 15+ teens.