Our Target Audience.

Our group has been thinking carefully about what type of people we will be aiming our media product to. After researching different Thriller/Mocumentary (Fake Documentary) style films and their target audience, here is what we found:

Cloverfield: 15-25 students

The Blair Witch Project: Both male and female 17-30 years old

Paranormal Activity: 15-30 years old both male and female

So, after this research we came to a conclusion that our audience would be quite wide but mainly start at the age of 15. We found that the reasoning behind this is that most of these films used viral marketing, especially social media to build the hype and the age that most use the internet is the younger generation, starting from 15 years old. We definitely want to build hype with our short film and use sites such as Facebook and Twitter to build parody profiles etc. to create an exciting buzz leading up to our release. We decided that our Target Audience should be both male and female from 15-40 years old. We think that a slight older age group would still enjoy our short film because of the history of the cinema that we will incorporate into the story line; I think that they would be intrigued by this and the younger generation would be most interested in the hype of the film and the scare factor.

Age Classification

All of the films above are obviously suitable for a 15- year old to watch, meaning that there is no gore or severe explicit content. They have still manged to create a scare without this and that is what we also aim to do. Sometimes the less obvious and smaller the event the scarier it becomes. Below is a link to the BBFC website for film classification, this is so that we can make sure what we can and can't include in our film and further our understanding of what age we should classify our film at. At the moment I believe we will use a 15 certificate.

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/what-classification/15




after making our decision on our target audience, we wanted to start to reach out to them and find out their opinions and most importantly what makes them scared! I created a short questionnaire on fears and emailed it out to our target audience so that we could get a better understanding of what to include in our film. Below are the questions we asked in the questionnaire:

Age:                Gender:

1.      Which one of the below are you most scared of? (Please write Yes beside your choice)

a)      The dark

b)      The Supernatural (ghosts)

c)      Aliens

d)      Criminals (Murderer etc)

2.      Could you explain the reason you are scared of the option you chose?

3.      In a dark situation what is the main thing you would be scared of happening?

4.      Are you more likely to watch a horror film that is, (Please write  yes beside your choice)

a)      Based on a real life event

or

b)      A work of fiction

 

5.      Do you find yourself more jumpy in,

a)      The day

or

b)      The night

 

6.      Before something jumpy happens in a film do you find yourself more scared when there is a soundtrack building the tension or complete silence?

a)      Soundtrack

b)      Silence

We have already received a few replies but we are still collecting the information. Once we have the information (ideally the end of next week) we can organise the results into a table and analyse our findings. :)