Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience demographic for our media product is mainly straight, British, both male and female, all ethnicities, working class as we feel our film can be used as an escape from the stress that could be going on at work and also students aged 15-24+ . The reason our media product targets both genders is because the genre is quite a uni-sexual one, psychological thriller, and does not usually appeal to one gender more than the other as it is known as a very entertaining genre and always keeps the audience on edge. This is exactly what we tried to convey by using many conventional methods for a psychological thriller, for example, low-key lighting, slow increase in pace of the soundtrack, enigma codes and the choice of our abandoned location.

The socio-economic status of our target audience for our media product is C2, D and E. The reason we target the bottom half of the scale is because our main target audience is 15-24+ which of course, the majority of this age range may still be in education and not earning money unless they have a part time job. We chose not to target lower than the age of 15 because our film would have scenes of swearing and violence and maybe even drug use which would not be appropriate for anyone under the age of 15 because at that age many people are yet to have matured and could possibly have a bad effect on them.

In terms of Uses and Gratifications theory our audience may use our media product the escape from the stress of education and be entertained as our opening sequence will keep them on edge and by having enigma codes they will connect with the film as they will be asking many questions and wanting to find out the answers.

We feel looking at Young and Rubicam's Audience Type Theory that 'the mainstreamer' and 'the struggler' are the two best suited types of people for our media product. The reason for this is because the struggler is a type of person who has a lot of struggles in their lives and needs escape from it all, and we feel our opening sequence is best suited for them as they can forget about what may be going on in their lives and instantly get engaged by our use of narrative enigma in our opening sequence. Our storyline may be difficult to understand so it will need our audience paying attention and not worrying about other struggles in their lives. The second type of person we would target is the mainstreamer as we feel our media product has such an entertaining storyline and plot that once someone has watched it, they will spread the word and other people will follow in their footsteps. It will urge people to want to fit in as they will not want to miss out on potentially a very exciting and engaging film.

The psychographic of the audience for our media product are people with mainstream fashion, have a sense of uncertainty because of the stress of their normal lives, who thrive on tense moments, and enjoy escaping and focusing on figuring out the questions they may who to do with our narrative.

Another reason we chose to target 15-24 year old's is because during our focus group which featured both males and females, they all seemed to very impressed with the opening sequence and would go and watch our media product in the cinema. Seeing as the people in our focus group were 16 and 17, it helped us decide to focus around that age range.

Another type of research we done in to our best suited target audience was through a questionnaire. We gave 10 people our questionnaire and made sure they were all from different ages, backgrounds and socio economic groups as the feedback we get would then have opinions from a wide variety of people. The feedback we got was that 9 out of the 10 people felt our target audience should be 16-20 years old as 11-15 years old is too young as our film is quite graphic and involves violence and bad language. This helped us in deciding on our target audience because it meant we had the opinions of people who were not involved.

Written by Robbie Butt