Q4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

Question 4)

When researching our audience we decided our audience was between the ages of 15-30 year olds. We felt this age was appropriate because of the type of narrative we have produced as our thriller does have a lot of violence and blood that is used and we felt that it’s not suitable for ages under the age of 15 due to the trauma it may cause people below the age of 15. We identified that our audience would be predominantly males due to the level of violence on show and thriller films are stereotypically more male’s type films as they are films that males can relate to in some way due to the normality of the daily routine that our killer goes through. The normality of the car and costume gives the males something to relate to, they can relate it to their everyday lives and routines. This also creates tension as they may see someone who seems normal but they are far from normal. When researching into thriller we took quite a big inspiration from the film ‘DEXTER’. We found the narrative of the opening sequence very exciting and it kept us guessing what was going on and the use of graphic matches help portray a psychological feel to it. We took inspiration from this and incorporated the graphic matches to make a normal daily routine look/feel sinister. This helps us with attracting our audience because the daily routine can gives them something to relate to.

The psychographics of our film I would say should be ‘the Mainstreamers’ this is because of the normality that has been brought into our thriller and it is also an everyday routine which most people will do almost every day in their life. This is why our typical audience member would be up to date with fashion and technology and be of a reasonable intelligence. All typical of a mainstreamer, they follow what everyone does and they choose current trends. We have chosen these type of people as our audience because we want to aim it at intelligent people and mainstream people, not just so they can understand our thriller opening but also so it can help promote our film to other mainstream people. If our audience is to be interested in our thriller they should be interested in TV programs such as ‘Homeland’ or ‘DEXTER’ due to the psychological narratives in the series and if they enjoyed these then they would understand and appreciate our thriller. I feel the use of mainstreamers for our audience is they will have that sophistication linked to our killer. The mainstreamers will fit into our age category of 15-30 as this is the age where fashion and technology is a big part of this particular age categories life. The ages are also the ages where adulthood is present and our film is to be taken seriously and the killer is portrayed as an adult and this helps as our audience can link to the killer in his normal and everyday actions.

We did a lot of research into our audience for our thriller and one way we researched them was by using Vox Pops and finding out what people around our age liked in their thriller films and we found a lot f conventions that are associated with thriller. These consist of things such as action, violence, weapons, blood and a lot of them said something that was going to thrill them and keep them on the edge of there seats. We planned our narrative around this as well of keeping the narrative of ‘DEXTER’ in our minds to aid our narrative further and we found that the use of ‘DEXTER’ and incorporating what our audience expects to see into one made an exciting idea ad thriller. We also found that our demographics were chosen carefully and accurately as the age group of 15-30 we found easier to work with and gather information from as they will be more interested in violence and action thriller films at this particular age. Although if we were to do the research again I feel we should use more analysed and detailed questions as I felt the questions we used were a bit vague and we could of asked more questions to seek more information to help aid our thriller further.

We felt that our audience would watch ‘Dexter’ as we aimed our audience at their typical audience and we did take big inspiration from their narrative but we did make it our own. We felt our audience would watch TV series such as ‘Dexter’ and ‘Homeland’ due to the violent and bloody nature they portray.

For our thriller movie we have decided we would have a BBFC Classification of 15. We have decided upon this because of the narrative of the story and its psychological sub-genre. We chose this age rating due to its psychological and violent nature. We feel the content of the opening may be too frightening for a younger age group and the content suitable above the age of 15 only. We felt this was a suitable age and also good for our sales and also good for our feedback. The use of age 12 may cause too much trauma for someone of the age of 12 to watch and this could cause a negative theme being portrayed about our film and be seen to have inappropriate content. The classification of 15 also lets us have fewer restraints and gives us the chance to allow more scenes of strong violence. We took into consideration the 18 classification although we felt the 15 could cope with the amount of violence and action portrayed in the thriller and due to the fact prolonged violence is not shown throughout the film only in short sections. Also the rating of 15 also allows us to keep our researched target audience of 15-30 which helps as it means we can have a large amount of sales where as we have a large audience and we wouldn’t have had to restrict our audience had it been an 18.