4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

We were able to identify our target audience’s needs by creating and carrying out research, such as questionnaires. We then collected the results from this research and analysed it carefully by producing data diagrams, such as pie charts, helping us to come to evaluate the elements that we should include in our production. Our target audience is 16-23 year olds because our intentions were to target it at students studying media as they can observe the techniques we used. On top of this the audience should be able to understand the topics used in the film, for example espionage and murder, and the complex plot. In addition to this we would expect this type of film to be of interest to this age group.

The questionnaire that we created included 15 questions all relating to our sub-genre. Questions asked were similar to the one above and others quizzed topics like specific sub-genres and what works well in a thriller in your opinion. We wanted to retrieve a large amount of data from this questionnaire to make it more reliable and so gave it to several people in our media class and other media classes from other schools. Not only that but we also sent some copies to Bath University for media students there to give us their feedback.

This proved to be a very useful form of research and we were able to make educated assumptions from it. We found that the most popular sub-genres of thriller are conspiracy and psychological, as expected. This helped us as a group to choose the conspiracy sub-genre to base our film on; we decided that this would be a little different from the ever-so common psychological thrillers. Another very useful piece of feedback was in response to ‘the key things that grab your attention in thrillers’. As shown in the chart above the more popular choices were characters, editing and costume, this was a great response for us as a small production team because of the low budget these were going to be the subjects we would rely on the most.   

We also gathered from our research that our film would be more appealing to males. This was neither a great surprise nor setback for our team as it is a conspiracy thriller. Similarly the Bourne Trilogy and James Bond have this demographic and are still both extremely popular films. Here I have created an audience profile for the kind of person we would expect to watch our film.

  

Demographic	Answer
Gender	Male
Age	20
General Interests	Media, music, film, editing, photography
TV Interests	Sherlock, Breaking Bad, Dexter, Prison Break
Film Interests	The Bourne Trilogy, James Bond, The Machinist, How I Live Now, Drive
Music Interests	Electronica, Rock, Classical
Use of multi-media	Social networking, Web-surfing, Netflix/Lovefilm
Class	Middle

The BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) would be a 15 for our film. This is because it contains strong violence such as the strangulation in the opening scene. According to the BBFC website this is allowed in a 15 movie but ‘it should not dwell on the infliction of pain or injury’ of which ours does not.  This obviously impacts as a whole who would be able to watch our film, however it does not affect our target audience, as it is 16-23 year olds. This violence would likely be frequent throughout the film, had it been complete. For the BBFC to classify our film as an 18 in our instance there would need to be ‘very strong violence’ with ‘strong blood and gore’ and probably ‘frequent strong language’. If our film was to be rated an 18 because of any of these reasons it is quite possible that the group would consider cutting video to keep to our 15 rating. This is mainly because of the effect it would have on our target audience; not being able to watch it. One of the main purposes of our film is to explore and challenge typical thriller conventions to benefit other media students therefore rating the film at 18 would be largely disadvantageous.