Evaluation - Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

For us, targeting the audience is one of the most important parts of the success of the film but first we need to know who they are and know a bit about them. I think personally our target audience are people from the age of 15 - 25. This is because it is a zombie horror film and will include lots of blood and gore therefore can't be anything under a 15 as it's not appropriate for viewers under that age. But a lot of modern day horrors are getting lower age ratings as people get less scared these days and because the film industry is advancing so much. So films like ours that maybe once would have been an 18 are now 12's and 15's. So looking at our audience a lot of 15 - 25 year olds are in education or just starting jobs. This means they often have a lot of time on their hands to watch the films. Now because I personally fall into this age group, I can say that people my age love going to the cinema to watch these type of zombie horror films as your imagination is at it's prime at a younger age so you become much more drawn into the world that is created through this film. Looking more into our target audience there's not really much preference into the gender and race etc. as long as they are in our age group the film should appear to them. So what does our target audience like to do? Well many of our target audience like to go out with friends and social activity is the most popular thing that they do. I know this because of my experience in this age group and most of my friends fall into this age group also and we like doing social activities which often include seeing films.

We did a lot of research into our target audience. We did a personal questionnaire which we didn't publish but kept with us when thinking of how to shoot the film and what to include in it. This is because we only asked a few close friends that fitted into our age group. We also did a video questionnaire and interviewed our target audience. We gave them the plot of the film and after they read through it we asked their opinions and a few questions about the film. This is really good as it is primary research and we get first hand responses. Also we did some other research as in our theory side of the media we were discussing as a class about what way people like to watch films and 20% said the Cinema, 30% said online, 5% said through subscription (such as Sky) and 45% said through DVD's. This told us that distribution was also a very important fact. This meant that we had to look into different ways we could distribute our film we made some promotional items such as DVD covers and film posters. We did a lot with this research as it influenced every decision we made. For example when looking at the scene or shot we were filming we thought: 'Is this appropriate for our target audience based on what we researched?' and most of the time we thought yes and carried on shooting but there were a few shots that we thought were not right and we retook them. Also we did this whilst writing the script as if there was language in the script we thought was too childish or too adult we adjusted it so it was much better and more suited to our target audience.