Evaluation Part 4 and 5: Audience Identification and Appeal

WHO WOULD BE THE AUDIENCE FOR YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT, AND HOW DID YOU ATTRACT/ADDRESS

YOUR AUDIENCE?• Our target audience for our media product is males aged 15-40. This is because our film

opening contains particular disturbing themes that could cause psychological harm to those under 15 years old. It would also not be understood by younger lower class members as it is mentally challenging. People of a high class (A from the sociodemographic model) would appeal to this type of opening as from the Uses and Gratifications theory this provides a sense of escapism from their daily lives, without being too easy for them that it is boring – they wish to be challenged.

• Our target audience would enjoy other psychological thriller films as well as drama and crime such as ‘Inception’, as these type of films apply an element of mental challenge which would engage our educated audience. Our target audience our reformers: they care about personal (intellectual) growth and our independent, so do not care about following trends set by society.

TARGET AUDIENCE• Our audience could be said to be for

mostly men in a relationship as suggested by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; the film does not provide the audience with love and affection and there is no dialogue with other characters in the production. The audience has to create a relationship with the character through sympathy incurred from the events that take place; therefore suggesting that no emotional attachment or action is gained from this media product.

AUDIENCE RESEARCH• We particularly targeted this target audience after researching into a

variety of films with a similar genre to ours. After watching each film opening we would carry out on analysis on said opening, whether we appealed to it, what gratifications it provided us with and so on. This analysis gave us an understanding on our audience’s wants and needs as well as what age, gender and social group we wished to aim our film at. After deciding on our target audience we used ‘Survey Monkey’ to address our audience and to gain feedback on our film opening idea.

• The results were extremely useful, as it provided us with extra information about our specific audience. We were then able to manipulate these results to change our final production task (such as the location, the credits etc) to create a more appealing media product, thus benefitting my group and I.

PRIMARY AUDIENCE RESEARCH• My group were able to attract/address our target

audience through a variety of technical codes such as: camerawork, editing, lighting, sound, mis-en-scene and credits.

• From our primary audience research we were able to establish our audience’s preferences such as: the victim being male, combining our credits into the narrative and using no dialogue etc. We used all of this feedback in creating our finished media product and once completed we used a focus group to get an even better understanding of our target audience’s preference and what gratifications they received.

CREDITS• For our credits, we started by researching film

opening credits in psychological thriller into google. We found a film called ‘Se7en’ which we particularly liked as we felt that the combination of the uncertain shots, with the eerie music and disorientating flashing credits was the best fit to our film opening. We created the credits using After Effects and inserted these into our film on Premiere Pro. The credits engaged the audience and provided them with enigma coding, causing them to feel a sense of uncertainty – which was our intended goal. This also provided the audience with a sense of escapism as stated in Dyer’s Utopian Theory.

^Inspiration from ‘Se7en’ and ‘Shutter Island

^Credits I created in my After Effects tutorial

^Final credits

LIGHTING• We used natural lighting in our film opening as we felt

that this juxtaposed with the action taking place; contrasting the stereotype of action taking place at night. Originally, we thought that using natural lighting at dusk was a good idea, but when reflecting on this footage we realised that the shots were of poor quality making the footage appear amateurish and unclear. We were able to use this failure to benefit my group as we understood each others strengths and weaknesses and more importantly, we got a clear idea of our film opening plot; using natural lighting during the day to film our present day shots.

• This allowed the audience to be attracted to our media product as it combined with the idea of juxtaposition with escapism, enabling the audience to experience a sense of satisfaction as posed by the Uses and Gratifications Theory and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Practice footage - night

Real footage - day

CAMERAWORK AND EDITING• We didn’t use a variety of shots, but focused on extreme close ups. We felt that

this provided the audience with the sense of escapism, distortion and challenge that the audience so desired from a psychological sci-fi thriller genre. The extreme close-ups attracted the audience through enigma coding, thus engaging them.

• The fast pace created by the editing again attracted the audience, as they were challenged to keep up with the narrative. The originality of the editing was key in conveying sinister elements such as a blue hue and the sin city effect. Particularly, the sin city effect allowed us to emphasise the dark red ‘blood’ on the scalpel, which signified danger and anguish to the audience.

Sin City Effect