Evaluation Question 4

Before we made the film and afterwards we took into account what the target audience would be and how we would alter or enhance aspects of the film introduction to suit this target audience. Evaluation Question 4 will be defining and describing the sort of target audience we have and Evalation Question 5 will analyse how we made this film introduction not only into a thrilling film but also one that will attract our target audience.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Some common themes in most thriller films are violence, psychological issues. These both may be a problem for younger audiences, but they may also be too intellectually demanding for younger audiences. Because of this, the thriller genre as a whole is often aimed at more adult audiences. However, there are several sub-genres to the thriller genre, each of which often having different target audiences.Our film introduction is that of a psychological thriller and Psychological thrillers are the most intellectually demanding of all the thriller sub-genres, and are therefore often aimed at older audiences, ranging from young adults (17/18 to 25 onwards). The confusing twists and turns and mature themes of psychological thrillers story lines may be too much to handle for younger audiences. A popular psychological thriller is 'Se7en' (1995). In addition a lot of the target audiences for Psychological thrillers are 18+ as they involve a lot of violence and psychological issues which would be disturbing for younger viewers, this could cause nightmares for younger viewers and cause them to be very scared for a longer period of time There is also research that shows that females are more attracted to psychological thrillers because they enjoy the story behind the events that take place in the movie, it has also been shown females like the intellectual side of strange psychologically challenging behaviour that features in psychological thrillers. People watch psychological thrillers for different reasons. After psychological research, researchers found a strong link between the desire to watch suspenseful and scary films or entertainment, and the viewers need for physical arousal and excitement. Meaning we like to watch these movies for the thrill of it. 'People like to be scared, when they feel safe' - Alfred Hitchcock. This is the idea that we enjoy watching it, as we are not the ones living it. Some people may watch it to revisit a trauma when younger, instead of having to actually re-live it. Or others may choose to watch to to help express/release their own aggressive and violent thoughts. Researchers at Kings College in London Found that the key to having a successful scary movie it to have the balance between the horror/suspense and gore, an example of this would be jaws.

Possible member of our target audience;

• He would be a law or psychology student who is fascinated by the human mind and finds films challenging these conventions a perfect watch. This is someone who challenges modern day stereotypes and conventions and reads between the lines. He enjoys films which are hard to grasp and requires an intellectual mind to understand the key concepts of a psychological thriller
• He would be the sort of person to listen to alternative music or maybe even dark music. He would not follow the refined mainstream pop music but delve further into the music world to find alternative, sometimes less well known music, and dramatic music such as opera would also be what he would listen to. 
• Following the theme of breaking the conventions of mainstream society he would look to shop in an alternative fashion and is very much wary of the issues surrounding fashion, including the increase in deforestation in Indonesia due to use of palm oil for clothes, or the use of child labour in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan for the production of cotton for Western clothes. Therefore he would reduce his budget and shop mainly in charity shops or second hand clothes. 

Upon analysing our initial audience research it became apparent that our target audience is someone who likes films with high levels of atmosphere and tension. 60.87% of the voters found Stephen Spielberg, renowned for his ability to create suspense (e.g. Jaws), to be the best thriller director of all time. In addition the graphs beneath show how atmosphere plays a key role in a thriller for our target audience. 

As we found out in most of the openings to thrillers dialogue is less prevalent and important than the music and the visuals as that will create the most atnosphere in the shortest space of time and subsequently will draw the audience in quicker. 

Red has connotations of blood, anguish and love and black has connotations of a sinister motif or death. Both of these are commonly used in thrillers to create atmosphere early on and we have tried to implement this into our own film introduction.

Audience Response

We audio recorded a mixture of groups for our audience response. Focus group one was made up of 5 girls spanning from the age of 16-18 (reaching the lower end of our target audience) and the second focus group consisted of two females and one male (as seen in the film introduction with two females playing the role of detective and victim and one male playing the role of antagonist). The second focus group also had a wider age range. The youngest participant was 18 years old and then we featured a 54 year old and a 56 year old to get a difference in answers from people who are at two different ends of the spectrum for age in terms of target audience. Beneath you can find the conversations recorded.