Audience evaluations
- 2. How did we attract/ address our audience? • In order to attract our audience we needed to know about them and in order to do this I carried out some research so that I could get to know what they expect of a horror film. • From doing this research it made it easier to understand and develop ideas of what to incorporate into our sequence to make it the most appealing to the audience. • One thing that I found out from the research is that our audience like to watch a film with a relatable character in it. • I also found out that we needed to use features that would draw in our audience and I think that we did that by using the best features, themes and ideas from recognizable horror films.
- 3. Paul Wood • Paul Wood is played by William Blunden in our opening sequence. • This character is very relatable to most people as he is your typical working class man, who has raised a child and she is now leaving to go to University. He is concerned about his child's safety and this is relatable to most people as parents are always looking out for their child's best interest.
- 4. Cindy Wood • Cindy Wood is played by Seona Carolan in our opening sequence. • This character uses the theme of innocence which can be seen in a lot of horror films as the victim. Cindy is also relatable to a lot of people as most people will have a sibling or a child that is naive and vulnerable.
- 5. Who would be the audience for your media product?
- 6. For our target audience, we aimed our media product at 15-25 year olds. This is the main age group of horror lovers as a lot of horror films are either 15+ or 18+. After research into the horror genre and the British Board of Film Classification we came to the decision that our film would be rated a 15, therefore making our minimum target audience 15. There are lots of different types of horror sub-genres within the horror genre and we chose to do gothic horror as our genre and use conventions to appeal to this. This type of psychological horror has a wide target audience so we thought it would have high demand.
- 7. Target Audience I decided that the audience that I want to target our film at are both males and females in the age group 15-35. I want to aim our film at both males and females, because our main characters are both male and female meaning that it isn’t dominated by a specific gender so will be appealing to both men and women. Typically men tend to prefer slasher and paranormal horror films, however our group felt that this cut off a large number of our female audience so we wanted to do a horror film that attracted an even amount of both. After research we found that the genre that attracted an even amount was psychological horror. Our secondary audience would be the older generation, this is because they don’t have any characters to relate to in the film so may not feel as pasionate about watching it.
- 8. We carried out some research to find out more about our audience. Target Audience Research
- 9. As you can see from the chart above more people feel sympathetic towards a female in a horror film than a male, however some people are still sympathetic towards the male. Taking this into consideration we decided to have both the male and female who played the main characters in our sequence to be the victims. The female is the victim of the doll but doesn't know it and the male is also the victim of the doll but he knows it. This means that the audience will obviously sympathize the female more but also sympathies the male. Gender
- 10. Linking to the topic of gender a lot of our audience didn't mind whether the main character was male or female, however a small percentage did so in order to keep this part of our audience we decided to have two main characters one of which is a male and the other a female.
- 11. Then from a question asked on ethnicity which can be seen above we found that our audience doesn't care about the ethnicity of characters which gave us the freedom to pick what we wanted the characters ethnicity to be. Meaning that we wouldn't loose part of our audience if we chose an actor of a certain ethnicity. Ethnicity
- 12. Finally we found that a large amount of our audience wants a horror film to have a deeper meaning then to just scare them. This is why we wanted our plot to be detailed and have a lot more to it then just being about the doll going round and killing everyone.
- 13. Collectively as a group we carried out some research where we asked people a questionnaire which we then individually put into graphs. These graphs then gave us an idea and an understanding of our target audience.