Friday 3 May 2013

Question 4 and 5: Audience Research


Question 4 and 5: Who would be the audience for your film? How did you attract/ address your audience?
  • Our target audience is a niche market. We would believe that our film would most likely become and independent film, released to an art house, or a platform release, however still attract a mass audience, due to the well know horror genre, and conventions used. Our demographics for our film would be teenagers or young adults, ageing roughly from 15-24 years of age, who are fans of the horror genre, and are looking for new takes on a traditional idea. It would attract a more male dominated audience; however, it would include anyone who is a horror fan, so that does not exclude females. It would appeal to a wide number of social groups, which is where the mass target audience comes in, as anyone can understand the narrative used in the film. The psychographics of of our film are people, who enjoy innovative ideas and want to try interesting, new independent films.
  • The characters would appeal to our target audience, due to all characters being teenagers, who appeals more widely to a teenage audience, as it allows the audience to relate to the conventions and characters better, than if they were of a different age range. It also appeals to the audience, as there is the use of dramatic irony throughout the opening, where the audience know about the vampires emerging, however it is not clear if the victim does or not. The preferred reading of the opening is that it is left at a cliff hanger, so the audience would believe that it leads on from the death of the man from the vampires, and continues onto discovering how to defeat them, which is what we tried to portray in our film. We hope the audience are able to decode that information from what we have made
  • We had many opportunities to test our project to an audience throughout the planning and development stages of the film making process. We began with the initial pitch idea, where we spoke to a group of peers and teachers, about 20 of them, where we discussed about what we are planning to do with our horror film, and the ideas we have come up with. This was our concept development, which meant after we pitched our idea, we received feedback from the group on what they liked about our film, what they believed the strengths were, as well as the weaknesses, and some ideas we need to improve on or change, such as they cast list we decided, which had to change, to have a variety of characters. This was useful to us, as we could then go away and improve our idea much more, before beginning the filming of the opening, and gave us a better understanding of what we were trying to achieve by the end of the project.
  • A week before our deadline date for our film, we presented a rough cut to the same people as our pitch was presented to, to gain some understanding of what an audience thought of our film, and what we would need to change before the deadline. We exported our rough cut, to allow everyone to view, but soon realised we need to needed to change some aspects, such as the sound levels of the dialogue and soundtrack, as well as some of the ordering of our shots and edits.
  • Audience feedback is very important when making a film, as it lets you know, what people enjoy about the film, what they don’t understand, or dislike about it, and what needs changing, adding or removing. We used our results from our surveys to find out what people enjoyed about it, so in the last editing stage, we could rearrange some of the clips and change parts that the audience did not understand, such as some of our narrative, so we changed the sound, so the narration comes in at a more appropriate stage, when the characters are in full view, and you can getter a better understanding of the character exposition.
  • From our audience research, when we were planning our idea, and understanding our target audience, we found out what type of horror film people of our age range and target market wanted. We discovered that our audience enjoyed quite a gruesome horror film, and favourites are films such as 'Saw' (James Wan,2004) and 'Texas Chainsaw Masacre' (Tobe Hooper,1974).



  • When we completed further audience research after our project was near completion, we found out what the audience thought the best of our film was, and what we needed to change. We came to the realisation  that some of the shots during the narration we used at the wrong point, so we had to make changes to when the narration comes in, and the cutting rate of some of the shots, especially when changing the location by using a cross cut.
                                         

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