Who would be the audience for your media product?

Q4) The target audience for my thriller opening is primarily 15 to 19 year olds, both male and female alongside horror fans, with a secondary audience of 20 to 25 year olds. Films like 'Cloverfield’ (Reeves - 2008)has a niche appeal. For us, the niche audience allowed us to work more towards the controversial topics of revenge and voyeurism. We were influenced by many film clips we had previously seen, including ‘Halloween’ which was based in an ordinary house. ‘Halloween’ is a successful movie amongst teenagers as it includes actors who are similar ages to the audience giving them something to relate to. Our character represents the target audience as she is a teenager. This makes the film more scary and successful as the audience can empathise with her. Before basing our opening sequence on horror I used questionnaires to gauge the market. I noticed that many teenagers were into horror movies and amongst the group this genre was the most popular. Another opening sequence which inspired us is ‘Se7en’ (Fincher, 1995). The opening creates a sense of enigma through identity of the man, similarly ‘Scarred’ creates enigma as the audience don’t know who else is in the house. Our opening sequence successfully targeted our audience (as proved by our questionnaires.) Our opening sequence was viewed by media students and non-media students in year 12 who gave our film opening sequence an average rating of 8 out of 10. Similarly, my 13 year old sister and 19 year old friend were also intrigued with our opening sequence and wanted to know more. Finally, I asked people who weren’t in our target audience (Male: 40 and Female: 28) who said they wouldn’t want to watch the rest of the movie as they have nothing to relate to it and didn’t find it as scary as our target audience did. We reckon this is because our target audience are at the age where they get scared easily. Someone being in your house is fearful in itself and our opening sequence has simply exaggerated the event to really target a certain audience
Teenagers are most likely to consume their films on the web and therefore it is wise to distribute our film to websites (refer to question 3).The age certificate for our film is 15 because it some murder scenes may be disturbing to younger children. Similarly ‘The Omen’ which is has an age certificate of 18 due to the disturbing story line based around a young boy which would not be suitable for anyone under 18 to watch.

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