Evaluation Question's 4 and 5 Script

Who would be the audience for your media product? How did you attract/address your audience?

We are aiming to have a target audience of 15 to 25 year olds as from research that we have conducted we found that most horror films have an age rating 15 as this will enable us to include the generic conventions of a horror film by using explicit content such the use of threats, blood and gore, violence and strong language, which is why we eventually decided to have a certification rating of 15.

As our demographic audience would mostly be teens and young adults of both genders when watching a horror film they would expect it to contain revealing content to give them a thrill and a sense of excitement. As our research shows that they often want to have a sense of fear and adrenaline when watching a horror film.

Furthermore the psychographic audience will most likely be mainstreamers who want to watch what other people are watching as they often follow trends. This research helped to see which characteristics fitted well with the codes and conventions within our own horror film.

All of our research then helped us to create our protagonist Marie, the fairly young aged helped to create a sense of realism for the younger audience around the age of 15 to 18 as they would be able to relate to the character more than they would to a 40 year old protagonist. Usually the media stereo typically represents teenagers as being moody, unsociable and in a negative light and girls would be represented as weak, however my group decided that we did not want our protagonist Marie to be represented as weak, moody but as a strong, independent and smart individual as this would strongly appeal to the female gender.

The uses and gratifications theory places focus on the audience, the theory states that the audience is not passive but take an active role in interpreting the media in their own way to give them a sense of pleasure. There are many ways in which the uses and gratifications can be applied to different media products, however in our film it used for social interaction and entertainment as when watching a horror film the audience want to be able to escape from reality.

We also used a mix of long shots and fast paced editing to build tension and suspense in our opening as we are aware that this is what our audience expects from a horror film. Additionally we used an establishing shot and tracking shots to put the audience in the characters shoes as we thought that this would increase suspense for our audience.

To get a better understanding of our audience we thought it would be beneficial to design a questionnaire to address the audience and to find out what they like about horror films. The questionnaire included questions about locations, characters, sub-genres, themes and other elements of a horror film, this then helped us to have a better understanding of our audience's expectations.

Furthermore we received feedback from our peers multiple times, our peers are in the age range of our target audience which was extremely helpful for us, and this feedback was to find out what the audience liked about our rough cuts so far and how we could improve to make it better and to ultimately gain a wider audience.

Finally we also created a pitch for our target audience which included preliminary ideas on our story line. The audience then gave us feedback, telling us what they liked and didn't like and what could be changed so that we could then develop our idea into greater detail.