Who would be the audience for your media product? (Task 4)

My Target Audience

The video above displays the different people I asked in order to discover what the target audience would be for my thriller opening sequence. We decided to ask a range of open and closed questions in order to find out more about the different age and gender categories and whether they would enjoy watching our thriller and whether our thriller would appeal to what particular category. The questions we chose to ask provided us with information about what the audience actually enjoy about this genre, what grabs their attention and we also described the plot of our thriller briefly and asked them whether they we likely to go and watch our thriller in the cinema. The answers to these questions provided us with adequate detail as to what exactly an audience look for in a thriller and it also gave a great indication as to whether they were likely to watch and enjoy our thriller. 

I have been conducting some research in order to discover what the target audience is for our opening sequence thriller film.

I have conducted this research by creating an interview with a range of open and closed questions in order to find out more about different people's opinions on thriller films.

In order to find out what our target audience was it was important that the interview was conducted with a range of ages and with both genders.

Here are the categories that the people we asked fitted into:

Girls 15-20

Boys 15-20

Women 21-39

Men 21-39

Women 40+

Men 40+

Here is a video that I made which visually presents the interviews that I conducted.

I asked a range of open and closed questions which would help me to figure out what gender, age group, likes and dislikes of our target audience. The video is at the top of this post. 

Below are the answers that the participants of the interview gave, which helped me to obtain my results, and ultimately figure out what my target audience is from the research. 

Girls 15-20

Age? 17

Fav genre of film? Comedy

Do you like thrillers? Some not all, more action thrillers. Why?

What grabs immediate attention? Unique twist

How do they make you feel? Something  exciting and something you  don’t expect happens

Would you watch our film? Yeah if there’s lots of action

Age? 17

Fav genre of film? Fantasy or romance

Do you like thrillers? Not a big fan, depends on what kind Why?

What grabs immediate attention? Interesting storyline interesting concept and has to grab attention quickly

How do they make you feel? Creeped out. Action= excited

Would you watch our film? Quite interesting to see that concept because I haven’t heard of it before.

Age? 17

Fav genre of film? Action thriller

Do you like thrillers? Yes, engaging Why?

What grabs immediate attention? Interesting and fast paced plot

How do they make you feel? Good, exhilarated good endorphins

Would you watch our film? Sounds amusing yes definitely.

Age? 17

Fav genre of film? Action

Do you like thrillers? Yes Why? Because they make your heart race

What grabs immediate attention? Plot line and the cast

How do they make you feel? Confused usually

Would you watch our film? Yeah sounds like fun

Men 21-39

Age? 21

Fav genre of film? Comedy or Sci-Fi

Do you like thrillers? Yeah but I’d rather watch something else Why?

What grabs immediate attention? The premise, franchise e.g  comic book

How do they make you feel? Depends on the sub-genre but usually good

Would you watch our film? If cast right and had a decent build up then yes.

Age? Late 20’s

Fav genre of film? Action

Do you like thrillers? Yes Why? Engaging, not obvious and have you thinking about them afterwards

What grabs immediate attention? Really good opening sequence something mysterious with a really good interesting character.

How do they make you feel? Good storyline= shocked, taken aback. Ambiguous or misleading.

Would you watch our film? Depends on the actor. Sound cliché so would have to be good actors. Sound action which I like.

Women 21-39

Age? 26

Fav genre of film? Comedy

Do you like thrillers? Yes they’re alright Why? Particularly gory thrillers

What grabs immediate attention? Hard to work out storyline, I don’t want to be able to work out the plot line too quickly. Cast

How do they make you feel? Emotional or bored

Would you watch our film? Sounds good but probably not

Women 40+

Age? 48

Fav genre of film? Psychological thrillers

Do you like thrillers? Yes Why? I like the excitement, tension, not knowing what will happen next

What grabs immediate attention? The tension, the actors, the opening scene

How do they make you feel? Relieved depending on the outcome, excited

Would you watch our film? Absolutely

Age? 75

Fav genre of film? Criminal

Do you like thrillers? Yes Why? The suspense and hoping I can solve the problem before the end of the movie

What grabs immediate attention? The actors, atmosphere and opening scene

How do they make you feel? Looking for more- sequel to the action

Would you watch our film? Yes I would

Men 40+

Age?  50

Fav genre of film? Thrillers

Do you like thrillers?  Why? Anticipation, build-up of the story, the opening scene and seeing how things develop and the twists and the turns. Soundtrack and atmosphere.

What grabs immediate attention? Opening scene is the most important but also unexpected twists & unpredictability

How do they make you feel? Scared

Would you watch our film? Yeah, sounds interesting

Age? Over 40

Fav genre of film? Dark comedy or music

Do you like thrillers? Not really Why?

What grabs immediate attention? Got to be interesting straight away.

How do they make you feel? Intrigued

Would you watch our film? No probably not

Below are some pie charts which display the results of the interview. These pie charts show that despite the fact that the most popular film genre across all of the groups was comedy, the next popular was action films, predominantly with males. This helped us to figure out that males would probably enjoy our thriller film more because they would enjoy the action of our film and would be able to engage better with the narrative of our film. Here are the pie charts displaying these results:

I was not surprised that the most popular film genre across both genders and all ages was comedy although it did surprise me as to how many people liked action films as I didn't expect action films to be so popular among a female audience. 

I was very surprised at the amount of female who like thriller and I was particularly shocked that our results revealed that the percentage of females who enjoy thrillers was higher than the percentage of males who like thriller films. I was expecting the results to be the other way around. However, despite this result our target audience still ended up being a male rather than female. 

After conducting our research, we have found that although different people from each of the age and gender categories could represent our target audience, we have decided that our main and selective target audience is males 21-39 years old as the people we asked from this category seemed the most intrigued by our plot line and we believe that the level of gore and violence would work better for a slightly older audience however, the amount of action would work better for an audience below 40. 

We discovered that males would probably enjoy our thriller more because most of the males said that they enjoyed action based thrillers whereas the females said that this bored them at times of frightened them. Although our thriller film could have a wide target audience ranging in ages and from both genres, it would work best with an audience of males between the ages of 21 and 39.

After discovering that our target audience for our thriller film would be males between the ages of 21 and 39 due to the fact that the people that we interviewed from this category showed the most positive results as they seemed to be interested and intrigued with our idea. They also showed the best results for enjoying thriller films and how they make them feel. 

Therefore in order to represent our target audience I decided to use social media to represent a typical member of our target audience. 

Below is a Facebook page that I have created that represents our target audience. This is a Facebook page for a 25 year old male, Danny Denotation. 

I created the Facebook page that represents our target audience by liking and sharing posts that were relevant to the likes of a typical member of out target audience. I liked posts that were to do with similar films to mine as well as pages to do with Tarantino, who is known for his thriller films and also pages to do with Action Thriller films.