Evaluation task 4Who are your audience & what have

you learned from them?

Intention of the productionWhen we planned our trailer we wanted the audience to leave feeling tense and

perhaps also quite scared. However the main aim was to ensure that they left feeling as though they would want to watch the actual movie, therefore we did plenty of research beforehand and aimed our trailer at a particular

target audience. This meant that hopefully those who watched our trailer will feel enthused to watch the real film. Through conducting research we

reached a conclusion to aim our film at an audience of 16-21.

This graph is taken from our target audience research. Here you can clearly see that majority of those asked that replied yes to this question were under the age of 21.

Using genre to appeal to a particular audience• Many viewers define themselves through movies genres, for instance they will be

attracted to films of a particular genre. In our case, promoting our film as a horror movie will instantly appeal to an audience who like to watch horror films and audiences who do not like the horror genre will not come and watch it.

• For this reason you will usually find the trailer for a horror movie in the cinemas before the viewing of another horror film. This way the film can be directed to a particular audience who clearly enjoy horror films. And money is therefore not wasted on advertising towards a viewer who would not be interested in watching the film.

Using genre to appeal to a particular audience

• To help us market our film to the correct audience we looked as IMDB Movie database’s and looked into demographic of our audience based on similar films and their demographics

• Here is an example of the conclusions we found from looking at The Woman in Black:

Here we can see that people aged under 18 rated the woman in Black the highest, with 7.2/10 and out of those, females rated higher than men

Audience TheoriesThe Hypodermic Needle Theory• Audience can be grouped into two types, a passive audience who believe what they

see and are somewhat brainwashed and an active audience who take the time to think about the meaning behind what they see. The Hypodermic Needle Theory suggests that the mass audience are passive and therefore the media 'injects' ideas into a passive audience, in particular with horror films

• In this sense, horror films can be dangerous as the audience receive the information they see, such as violence and crime and make no attempt on their part to process or challenge it thus them becoming vulnerable and easily manipulated by the film. This is especially dangerous with children who are known to be quite gullible and would perhaps watch a movie such as 'Scream' and take it's ideologies as the norm. Therefore a child would not be suitable watching our film as they may seek revenge ideas which is why we restricted our film to a viewing audience over 15.

Example of The Hypodermic Needle TheoryAn example of this theory is the infamous radio dramatisation of the science fiction

novel, 'The war of the worlds' in 1938 which was performed like a contemporary news broadcast . However the audience listened to this simulation and began to

believe that it was in fact a genuine account of an alien invasion and began hiding in homes and preparing weapons as an attempt to defend themselves from the

supposed attack.

After the Jamie Bulger case where two young boys murdered Jamie in a brutal way, suspected to be copying

the acts performed in the movie Childs Play, the BBFC Brought in new Regulations for home cinema under the Video Recordings act 1984 this meant that videos had to

be submitted for Classifications, prior to this no certificates had been introduced and therefore anyone of

any age could watch whichever movie they wanted.

Example of The Hypodermic Needle Theoryin Horror

Blulmer and Katz – 1974In the book ‘The uses of mass communications’ a theory has been produced containing

4 reasons why audience use media:

1. Diversion; For the idea of escapism and to release oneself from everyday pressures2. Personal Relationships; To gain or improve friendships or relationships, the

sociability through discussing media products3. Personal Identity; The ability to compare ones own life with particular characters or

relate to certain events with a media text4. Surveillance; To gather information and/or facts

Through researching theories like this we could use them as an advantage for our own media text. For example, You wouldn’t usually go to see a horror movie by yourself,

therefore the audience will be bigger because if someone wants to watch our movie they would usually as a friend to see it with them. Another example is that there are many themes within our narrative in which the audience can relate, a

main one being bullying. A number of people could perhaps sympathise with our main character Cassandra who gets bullied. (link to the relevant theory)

Audience Theories

Representations within our product

• The Audience respond to the representations they see within a movie, for instance the young women in our trailer are mainly represented as victims and therefore the audience would respond with sympathy.

• Another representation that had been made within our movie is having an innocent child turn evil. Though conducting research we found this prospect to be quite scary for viewers and therefore we used this in our own trailer and it proved to be successful.

• The audience can see a transition of the representation of our young females in the trailer. For instance our main character starts off as a vulnerable victim but later on transitions into the powerful antagonist who victimises another young female.

Audience FeedbackAfter watching the trailer we asked our focus group to fill in a questionnaire. First of all

and possibly most importantly we had a very equal focus group in terms of Gender. Not only is it fair to keep the ratio of male to females equal but also through

previous research we found that neither demographic showed a greater interest in horror films and therefore the results would not be bias is any way.

It is also worthy of note that all the questionnaires were anonymous and therefore nobody felt obliged to write an answer just to please us. They could feel

comfortable to answer truthfully.

Male10Female

11

Gender

Audience Feedback

Male Female0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Would you pay to watch the full film?

YesNo

16-19 20+02468

10121416

Would you pay to watch the full film?

YesNo

We are fortunate enough to find that 100% of our focus group said that they would not only want to see the full film but also that they were willing to pay a price to do so. This is really pleasing and uplifting news for my production team and I because this is evidence that we

achieved the desired intention of wanting our viewers to watch the trailer feeling enticed to watch to whole movie and find out what happens to the characters.

Should the results have been different we would have analysed whether it was a gender related difference or an age related difference. Perhaps we would have found that an older audience did

not enjoy the trailer but fortunately that was not the case.

Audience FeedbackOur questionnaire proceeded to ask if our audience had jumped at a particular section.

Results showed that 100% of our female group did jump at some point in the trailer whereas only 50% of the males jumped at some point in the trailer. Perhaps this is

due to males being stereotypically stronger and less fearful than females. We then asked those who had jumped to describe when they did so and we categorised

them into 3 moments in the trailer, the door slamming in store cupboard scene was the most popular moment and perhaps this was due to the slow build up of the

monologue increasing the tension felt by the audience. A Scene in which we originally assumed would be the most scary was the scream at the

end however on reflection I feel as though it was a bit cliché and although it did come as a shock to some audience members perhaps because there was no build up the

viewers didn’t feel tense and therefore were less frightened.

Female Male0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Did the trailer make you jump at any point?

YesNo

Store Cupboard Scream Strangle02468

10121416

Moments that people jumped at

Series2

Audience Feedback

Period Horror Thriler0

5

10

15

20

25

What genre do you think the film is?

Series1

We gave our audience an open question asking what genre they thought the film was. For this question we did not give options so that we could really see what the audience thought without

being given ideas by ourselves. We were very pleased to see that 100% of the focus group believed that the trailer was a horror yet also others thought that there were one or two sub-

genres included, one being thriller in which was not correct but I can understand that horror and thrillers are close genres and also our horror is slightly more to the thriller side than a slasher for

instance. The other genre spotted was the period genre which is very pleasing to see because we did

show sections of past scenes within our trailer which evidently have been noted.

Audience Feedback

Bullying

Suicid

e

Spirit

relea

sed

Cassan

dras Diar

y

Reven

ge

Haunting

0

4

8

12

How much of the storyline was understood

Series1

Finally, a very important factor was to see if our viewers understood the storyline having not been told anything about it beforehand so we gave them a couple of lines to write down what

they thought the storyline would be. My production team and I thought about 6 main points that we hoped the audience would pick up on and then we looked at the audiences answers. Luckily enough the story was clear enough that every point was picked up on, some more than others, For example everyone noticed that

the story was about bullying and haunting which we hoped would be quite obvious. To the viewers who had thought more about what they had seen, they picked up on issues such as the

importance of Cassandra's diary and themes of revenge, Some of the less obvious aspects was the suicide, only four people picked this up but one or two did say ‘Something happens to the main character’ which is still good news because we like the mystery element and maybe these people would want to find out what exactly happens to her.

Development in skillsThis year we thought a lot more about the audience and how we should market our

trailer in order to get the best possible outcome than we had done in a last production. I personally feel that this has improved my skills, skills in which I will carry with me into my future. I didn’t realise until I conducted my research earlier this year

just how important it is to direct your film to a particular demographic.

Through this I believe that our production was somewhat better because not only could we apply our finding to the actual trailer but it improved our marketing too.

For example, after having reached a conclusion that the target audience would be 16-25 years we realised that this is the perfect demographic to market our film to over

social networking sites. Therefore we created a twitter page and also introduced a hashtag for viewers to follow on.

A Success?

Personally I believe that our trailer was a success. All of our original intentions were

reached whether that be on a personal level to do with editing and producing or how our

audience reacted to it on the first viewing. It is very uplifting to here that not only did they

find it scary and thrilling but they also felt that the narrative was strong enough to want to

watch the whole movie.