AS Media
G321
Foundation
Portfolio
Question 5; How did you attract/address your audience?
Wednesday 1st April
During our research and planning we found our target audience would be both males and females with an age range of fifteen to twenty five. We first decided we would try to attract our target audience by using characters that they would find it easy to relate to and form a bond/relationship with. In order to do this we used characters of a range of ages in the clip; you can see young children (0:42), teenagers (0:18, 1:08) and adults (0:46, 0:08).
As the murderer.
As murder victim
As murder victim
As murder victim
As murder victim
As murder victim
As murder victim
As murder victim
Our cast was made of females, appealing to a range of females.
The range of ages means that we can appeal to a wider spectrum of our target audience and more closely satisfy the needs of people of each age in our demographic. This will also help them to create relationships with or relate to a particular character (Uses and Gratifications; Personal Identity and Relationships). We feel this will help attract our intended audience beacuse it means they'll be more emotionally interested in the characters and opening as well as just interested in it as a media product.
In our opening our antagonist kills multiple children, this creates a common enemy to unify our audience, this creates a common interest in the protagonist(s). And also keeps the audience attracted and interested in the character dynamics and development throughout the events of the opening (and full film). This unity will create an escape for viewers since the protagonists will also be united against the antagonist, this will make our audience feel like they're a character and they're being brought into a new world, therefore escaping their own reality (Uses and Gratifications; Diversion).
I feel we appeal more heavily to women using characters because we have a female cast which will obviously be less appealing to a male audience. We chose to do this because we think it give us some originality and because our audience weighs more heavily in females. We thought it would be more appealing to the larger half of our audience, by appealing to the mass using characters we can draw in a large audience using characters and use other elements of the media product to appeal to the smaller sections of the target audience in this case males. Because of the majorly female cast we chose to avoid using character archetypes in our opening because although generally they're successful we didn't think that they would have a part in our opening or fit with what we were trying to create in our opening. I also felt this would remove some of the originality we had in our opening.
As seen our audience research showed that the majority of our audience was female and therefore we'd have to appeal more heavily to a female audience.
We also created interest in our opening using the events; we wanted to keep with the conventions of thriller films in terms of events, keeping the mystery and violence. We chose our main event to be murder adding supernatural elements (shown through superimposition) to create mystery that would appeal to our target audience. We chose murder because we thought it would be exciting for our niche, as an event not often see off-screen it's considered tense and rousing to the mass. This will aid the diversion element of the our opening to our demographic.
We also chose these particular themes and events to appeal to the male audience more than the female because we more closely focused on females using characters. We thought the grisly events and explicit nature of them would appeal to a male audience more so that the males would have something to keep them attracted to the opening. Males are more aggressive in general than females, leading us to believe that the violence and explicit events would appeal heavily to them as a group of people.
We used a range of camerawork in order to make our video look professional and of a higher quality, this would attract a more experienced or opinionated audience who have higher standards when it comes to films or television. We thought this would also give us an edge over possible competition from other independant films, which would make it easier to get a larger audience base for our film.
Two examples of camerawork we used.
We also used a range of editing techniques for this reason, we used superimposition, filters and non-continuity editing to attract our target audience. We thought more sophisticated editing and camera techniques would be more attractive to our niche as they would want something exciting and snappy to be featured in the opening to intrigue them and entice them to watch our media product. The editing techniques also add to the supernatural element of our opening and therefore create mystery which is what (primarily) will draw the audience to the opening, the use of supernatural elements and superimposition creates a fractured reality therefore creating a diversion from reality for our demographic.
The thriller genre in general is more popular with young adults so purely by choosing this genre we're appealing to our target audience. We chose to use elements of the horror (the explicit nature of the events) and fantasy (the antagonist/non-continuity editing) in order to appeal to our audience. We chose these two sub-genres because they're popular genres and often have a 'cult' following based around their genre (like thriller films). It's not uncommon for these three genres to be combined to create a media product, since it's already an establish genre combination there will already be an audience for it, that hopefully will be attracted to our media product because of the genre.
We wanted to appeal to our audience using different elements, a big one we focused on varying was the sound we used in our opening. We tried to vary the different sounds we used, by using a varied amount of sounds and effects we felt we could appeal more to people who like to think about the more technical elements of media products. We had a backing track, sound effects and a voiceover. We felt the use of these would keep our niche interested and hopefully attract them because the variation in sound would be more professional and look better as a whole product if we used more complex technical techniques.
We thought the mix of sounds would be quite different because often thrillers just use a backing track and focus more on the visual elements of film, we thought that if we put emphasis on the audio elements of the film it would make our film stand out more to attract our target audience.
Sony Vegas Pro; the website we used to do our editing, post-filming. This is where we added all our sound effects, voice over and backing track.
After we'd finished our rough cut we did audience feedback on the rough cut, one of the questions was about what our titles. We'd originally decided that our text would be a sans-serif font that would look kind of jagged and scratched, we'd also planned to use a red font. We thought this would be eye catching and be different. However in our audience feedback somebody mentioned that they thought a smart newspaper type font would look good. After playing around with this idea and looking at smarted fonts we decided the smart font looked better and we would use them for our titles but keep our previously chosen font for the main title.
We felt like this would be appealing to our target audience because it shows we're adaptable and can take constructive criticism from our viewers. We thought this would be attractive to a possible audience because it means that we listen to our niche and their opinions. This we felt would be a good thing for our demographic to see because a lot of the bigger hollywood production companies will choose whatever option makes them more money no matter how unpopular the decision seems. We felt that showing our niche we listen to them would attract a more mature and loyal audience which we would need because we're an independant media production company.
We tried to attract our audience by using a mix of the four technical elements (sound, camera work, mise en scene, editing) in both conventional and non-conventional ways. We used conventional ways to appeal to the niche of thriller films lovers who watch them a lot and like to motifs and thriller-specific events and themes. We used non-conventional ways to appeal to the audience because a key feature of thrillers is that each one is unique and has their own separate motifs that they use throughout the media product. I think that we succesfully mixed the use of conventional and non-conventional elements of film to succesfully attract our target audience.