Audience Theory

Audience Classification

This is the demographic social grade scale, which is usually used to identify an audience.

In our case the scale is not really useful for us, because our audience doesn’t depend on income, but on level of education.

Short films are usually show cased on short film festivals, which a mostly visited by students and pensioners.

So the grade for the majority our audience would be E and maybe B, because people that own business might look for talent or videographers that are looking for sponsorships, or they might be a client.

Uses and GratificationKatz and Blumler believed that audiences consume media texts for many different reasons:

1. Information

2. Personal Identity

3. Integration and Social Interaction

4. Entertainment

The main reason for our audience would be Information. Other students will be curious about our work as we are about there. They will at our film to see how a short film is made, because we also posted a lot of behind the scenes episodes on our YouTube cannel.

Entertainment could be a reason for our audience, but not as big of a reason as information, because people who are into short films are usually also people who make short films are somehow related to the film industry.

Personal Identity and Integration and Social Interaction are less likely to be reasons for our audience to watch our film. The age group that we are targeting usually does that through real life interaction or social media.

Stuart HallStuart Hall’s Reception Theory says that texts are interpret for a specific and preferred reading.

Negotiate reading:The audience reads the media text as the producer wants it to read it. For example in our film we expect the audience to be happy for the teacher even though he does something illegal.

Oppositional or subversive reading:This means the audience doesn’t read the text as it was intended to be read by the producer.For example, the audience may think that the teacher in our film is completely evil and unprofessional. This usually happens, when the audience has completely different morals or a different perception of the world as the producer.

StatisticsHere are some statistics about our audience on YouTube. These Statistics

are from 25.03.2014.

As you can see, our videos have been seen in many countries all around the world.It’s really fascinating how our production has spread throughout the world, which was really unexpected.

Most of our audience is male, which is good, because our film would appeal more to a male audience.The majority of our audience comes from an English speaking country, which again is perfect for us.Most our Audience comes from YouTube, as you can tell by the graphics in the bottom.

The majority of our audience is between 13 and 17 years old.

It’s a perfect situation for us, because this is the age group we targeted.