Evaluation

- Who would be the audience for your media product?

- How did you attract/address your niche audience?

By Harry Pennington

Focus Groups- Our audience was identified through our use of focus groups and surveys, through this we have a reliable outlook on the audience that will be most attracted to our production.

- The audience that we identified to be our largest base is male young to middle aged (19-60) and we would also gain around just under half of females in the same bracket according to our focus group activities. The class of our audience is working to middle class, and we have we have no ethnicity that we have tailored our production for.- We decided that in order to get a better picture of what people were looking for from our film, the best idea was to create a group on Facebook to use as our main “Focus group”. We asked questions about British Crime films in order to collect data which could then be transferred into expanding our audience, and making our current audience more satisfied. The images show some features of our Focus Group, and we even carried out a Survey: The results of which can be seen on this print screen of Excel.

Getting an Audience

- We’ve attracted our audience by appealing to all that they look for in this kind of film.

- We have ensured that the mix of humour, violence, language and style have all been mixed in the correct way that entices the audience we made this for.

- Our research into Codes and Conventions has helped us provide a better insight into what kinds of things people are looking for in a British Crime film, and have ensured that these things are present, to the best of our abilities.

- Based on how the surveys and research panned out, it can be clearly seen that there are significant requirements on different aspects of the film that should be fulfilled. I believe that we have indeed fulfilled these and that this has helped us obtain a section of the film-viewing population.

Mise-en-scène

- In terms of mise-en-scène we made sure the props and scenery were typical of British crime films, so quite run down areas with common cars that you’d see everyday, the clothing was also very ‘normal’ of a British crime film so the mise-en-scène was familiar to people who regularly indulge in such films.

In keeping with the context of British Crime films, we have strictly adhered to the general rules of costumes and the characters that they represent: Ordinary clothes for the brawny and stupid, Smart attire for the brains of the operation. It is plain to see which character fits into which category, and the images quite clearly show the obvious differences between Irish Tommy (left) and The Suit (right) who are two of the main characters in our film.

Readings- In terms of preferred reading, everything adds up. The whole set up has been tailored to show exactly what’s going on with as little chance of the audience seeing something different to what’s meant. This means that the whole story itself isn’t too complicated, the characters are relatively straight forward and so is the narration.

- This means that the chance of misinterpretation is lowered and our preferred meaning will be met whilst also keeping the audience enticed.

- The way our characters are perceived are also well presented, again tailored so how we want them to be seen can’t be misconstrued into something different. For example, The ‘boss’ is in a dark room and the build and look of him show exactly what he is. Then this is immediately backed up by his speech, his speech gives him the power complex you expect him to have. When he calls Irish Tommy an ‘idiot’ etc. he shows how much higher and more knowledgeable he is than him.

Characters

- For example Irish Tommy doesn’t have enough time on screen to properly get across the image

that he’s stupid. You only get that impression when he is on the phone to the boss and by

then the audience should already know what he means.

- There is also no prior explanation to what the starting scene is about, so it could be

interpreted as either a hit, punishment, or a robbery. If we had any prior scenes we could

have used them to build up the present situation.

- However, our portrayal of the characters was rather brief. We could have put in more detail into the characters as a whole rather than a quick introduction. This means that there is a chance of our preferred reading to be misconstrued by the audience.

Codes and Conventions

- The product also conforms well to the codes and conventions on the genre of the film.

- Because of this we will gain more viewers as the film will conform to exactly what they would be expecting of a film of that genre.

- The character of The Suit in particular seems to go against the normal codes of such a film as this: We hardly know anything about him apart from the fact he “makes sure everything goes to plan” and could attract a different kind of audience who like to see things that go against the hegemonic norm for a British Crime film.

How to Improve

- Our characters are also quite simple, offering little in depth showing, again in order to more captivate the audience we could have made each character that little bit more detailed and explained to offer more context and complexity.

- With our audience range that we got a good idea from using our focus group we saw that we weren’t picking up a large viewing from the female audience.

- This may have been increased by the introduction of a female character which we have failed to do, had we done this then we may have increased the amount of people in our audience as we’d have taken a larger share of female viewers. But we’ve lost then due to the lack of a female character.