Who would be the audience for your media product, and how did

you attract/address your audience?

By Chloe Wood

Our target audience was 15-30, this is the conventional age group that horror movies are targeted to, many of the films that we researched were not under a 15 age rating, this being because in any horror movie there will always be an element of terror, we felt also in our movie opening, although there was no blood or gore, that the context could be found to be quite disturbing for a younger child and this is why we decided to keep to the conventional target audience. We also found the information that we needed from our surveys which showed us that the age group that found our style of horror to be best were around their late teens and this continued throughout our filming process, we found that also when testing out the storyline on younger years, that many were not able to understand the concept and it was essential to us that our storyline could be understood we wanted mystery but

not complete confusion to consume our audience.

We needed an older audience to be able to understand the concept and be able to look into the mystery, and old enough to understand the empathy needed, but we also did not want to focus the film at an much older target audience who commonly do not watch horror movies, and we did test

this out, screening our first draft of the movie opening to a 40+ audience and although it was appreciated we did not get a reaction that we needed and so we found that our first choice of

targeting at 15+ was correct. We also interviewed two people that fit into the age group and we asked them why they thought that young adults were so interested in horror movies “This age

group want excitement and want to escape from their normal lives” and “This age group constantly want to feel like adults, and they think it is mature to watch these movies, they want the

adrenaline rush that accompanies with being scared. It’s a game to them.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8v1QV8hfWCU

A way in which we tried to reach our target audience was through social media, we created a Facebook page and placed updates on the page as we went through our process of making the movie opening, this reached out to a great amount of our target audience and many people were extremely interested after hearing the

storyline, we planned to place our final outcome on the Facebook page and this an extremely positive reaction, we also posted our movie poster on other social medias such as Instagram and this expanded our

reach out the public further.

Although horror is not commonly thought of as a higher class genre but with our thriller/mystery aspects we found that we would much prefer to aim at people in a higher socio-demographic group, because we making our film we began to know that we wanted it to have a simple but complex storyline that the audience would need to lightly study, finding out things before the characters do and this made us want to target our film at

intelligent people that want to be challenged.

When looking into Blumier and Katz's uses and gratifications theory we wanted to see what we wanted our audience would gain from watching our movie opening and after studying the different gratifications I found

that the most suited to our film would be Diversion (escapism) which means that audience uses media as emotional release, it could also be Integration and Social Interaction. These two gratifications would be most suited as our movie opening could be seen as a way of emotional release as I feel as though our film could be

a very emotionally cleansing thing, this is because it is within the topic of child death which is a very disturbing topic to many, it would also in terms of audience pleasures be a visceral piece as I believe that it would

provoke many of a physical reaction.

Our target audience might also enjoy genres such as crime dramas, thrillers and perhaps sci-fi. These specific genres are usually aimed at just above our minimal age (15) for example 20+ but we also found that mysteries are growing in popularity with the ongoing rise in TV series such as Broadchurch, orphan black and Sherlock and this is why we tried to incorporate this element in as crime drama is growing in

popularity and also these types of genres all need a certain level of intellect and also make the audience anxious and are filled with tension, much alike our movie opening.