EVALUATION - Audience and our trailer

These are the notes we made in a media lesson relating to audience and our film:

We were asked to consider the following questions:

• Who is the target audience for the production? Define by age, race, gender, social class etc
• Why will the production appeal to the target audience?
• What techniques and lines of appeal has the production used to attract the target audience?
• What uses and gratifications will the target audience set from the production?

For the first question we thought there was other things to consider apart from age, race, gender and social class. Sexuality, occupation and general interests where the ones we thought of. By general interest we mean what hobbies the person has, what type of films do they like (which ones would they see in the cinema and which ones would they actually buy), what magazines they read, how often they watch TV etc. We thought that these things were important for a production company to consider when deciding their target audience.

Our target audience varies, if we were to generalise our audience then our target audience would be males from the ages of 16 and 25. We thought these ages are appropriate as our film is not for children and it stars young adults so they would be able to identify with the characters. We have found that generally males prefer thrillers and horror films to females and as our film is not pretending to be 'ground breaking' or a 'classic' it is probable that an older audience will be less interested especially because of the young characters. However as we have a female main character and she is what is focused on in the trailer this may attract a female audience, we also show romantic scenes which will attract a different audience as it shows a different genre. This makes our film appeal to couples also.

For the second question we considered; context, sound, costume, casting and camera shots. In our trailer the sound track is a main feature as it builds tension and shows clearly the genre of the film. The sound track also adds mystery, this is good has we have found enigma is an effective part of a teaser trailer. We chose our costumes carefully, we made sure Megan always wore bright colours and in one scene she wears white this portrays her to be a happy innocent character. Eric however is always seen in dark colours this tells the audience that they might not be able to trust him. For casting we chose Jen as she had worked with us before and we knew of her acting talent, she is able to look very afraid and vulnerable which we needed for our trailer. We asked Raf to be in our trailer as in some ways he is the perfect villain, he is a lot taller than Jen so can look dominant and he is also an actor so he is able to look menacing and do the 'sideways smile' or 'crook-ed smile' which is often seen in films when someone has done something wrong but which they are proud of. The two of them also work together a lot at school and show they were able to act brilliantly with each other. I think our casting chooses have worked out very well for our trailer. We made sure we had shots of the camera looking down on Megan to make her seem vulnerable, there is a high angle shot of her as the voice over starts, this makes it almost seem as Eric is looking down on her, he is the one making her vulnerable. I think these things will appeal to our target audience as they show clearly the genre of the film, give away some characteristics of the characters and the narrative.

For the third question the answers are much the same as the second. One main part of our trailer I think will attract our target audience is the way the soundtrack is linked to the shots, this makes our trailer flow a lot better and allows the audiences emotions to build as the soundtrack does. The captions we used also will attract an audience as they some some of the narrative but still leave a lot of unanswered questions.

The forth question relates to the gratification theory, we studied to theories in that lesson the gratification one and the hypodermic needle theory. I am going to discuss these theories is separate posts so I will be able to go over them in more detail. Both of these theories relate to our trailer.

Rach.