Evaluation Activity 4 (Maria - 4326)

Who would be the audience for 

your media product?

From previous audience research, we decided that our target audience would be 15-25 year olds. We set this age bracket as we felt the opening to our thriller better suited a younger generation and our research supported this.

Age and gender of our audience?

When researching film certificates, we specifically looked into ratings 15 and 18. The 18 rating would be too high for our thriller as our opening did not contain such offensive scenes and we felt that we would have a greater audience if we lowered our rating to a 15. This proved correct as when we interviewed a typical 16 year old boy we found that he was very interested in many types of thrillers and rating ours 18 would exclude valuable audience members from our film. 
However we could not lower our film rated any more as there is hinted violence in the opening that would potentially get stronger throughout the film therefore settled at a 15 rating.

Another reason why our film opening appeals to this target audience is our main characters are around the same age and so our target audience can feel more connected to the characters. 
Even though both characters are female and this could limit our film to the female gender, however as the villain breaks the stereotype of a 'weak and vulnerable' female, this makes our film more interesting to watch and appeal to all genders. 

17 Year old audience member.

20 Year old audience member.

How have we targeted our audience?

When interviewing a 16 year old boy in our target audience, he mentioned that the reason why he was enticed to thrillers was the opening gripped him from the start keeping him interested throughout. He also liked how the opening raised questions such as who was the villain?, why where they there? etc. This is a common thriller convention and in this way will target our audience as we found out that this was the most popular type of thriller in this age group male or female, as we interviewed 4 different types of people who all had similar views.

Through technical aspects we targeted our audience as our main characters costume is similar to the typical audience member. Through props, a dog is also a common possession of a young adult. The editing, (quick jump cuts) and varied camera angles such as panning grip our young audience. The soundtrack also adds gripping nature.

Similar thriller films?

The Hunger Games is a real life product that has similarities with our thriller. The main character in the hunger games is a strong dominant female which breaks the stereotype of a vulnerable shy girl just like our female antagonist. This thriller also appeals to our target audience and this idea of a powerful female would entice a greater audience to our film as it is different than the conventional stalker thriller. 

On the other hand, the conventional stereotype in our thriller of a weak female victim is also shown. Films such as Scream, Psycho, The Twilight Saga and Taken are all examples of successful films that have used the stereotype of a vulnerable female character. Scream also features a blonde victim just like our protagonist is blonde.

(Female Victims, Above: Psycho, Below: Taken.)