Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

During our research stage of our production we had to produce a questionnaire that was given to a sample of 30 different people to get their views about our specific movie genre and sub-genre. By questioning 30 people our sample research was rather broad as we were able to get a large range of different people and there ideas and expectations of a thriller movie. After taking in the results we were able to see that we interviewed 27 people aged between 15-19 and 3 people aged 35+ which meant that this genre of film actually appealed to people of all ages from rather young to those more mature. This was also accompanied by the fact that we interviewed 10 males and 20 females which meant that again our results were mixed, yet Thriller movies still remained popular with each which helped us realise our ideal target audience.

Our target audience was confirmed after the results from the questionnaire were taken in as we realised that this chosen genre appealed to people of most ages and both genders, therefore we decided to make sure that we also made our film appealing to both males and females between the ages of 16 and 40, however this does not mean that people outside this age would not like our film, but they would not be our target audience. 
The way we attempted to make the film acceptable for our target audience was by using mise-en-scene, lighting, camera movements and Propp's idea of the hero and villain. Throughout the filming we made sure that we followed the expectations that were given from our audience research to make sure that it followed the conventions of a typical thriller as well as appealed to the audience as the feedback was from people who were part of our target audience.
From our results, it was noticed that the most popular choice for our antagonist was an escaped convict and the protagonist should be a police officer, therefore we used this to create a good story-line based around these characters. We also took note of the fact that the audience expected shots such as close ups and establishing shots which we were able to incorporate into our filming which helped the audience to understand the characters and surroundings in more detail. On the other hand we didn't follow the audiences preferred idea of using slow motion, yet instead we used some fade to blacks at the beginning which were used to capture the audience in suspense right from the beginning which is typical within a thriller film.

As for characters we attempted to make it as stereotypical as possible for a thriller film as we made sure that our heros and villains were both males which were typical within this genre as males generally have more power and dominance within a film, whereas the females are normally the damsels in distress as they are seen as weak and vulnerable. By using an image of the wife on a piece of paper, and a woman dead in the first scene, it helps to signify their inferiority in contrast to the males who are shown as psychotic murderers or policemen who have much authority within the community, which again follows this convention that males are much more superior.

After screening our film to an audience of 16-17 year olds, we recieved some audience feedback which proved that our decisions to use the audience research how we did was the correct choice as we only had a small amount of negative comments which we took on board. The most common problem was the reflection at the beginning of the film on the 20th Century Fox scene, however this was due to technical reasons as we were unable to download the original so we had to record it manually. Another comment was the idea of the villain wearing a mask to cover their identity, however we chose not to do this as we wanted the audience to see the villain it allows them to see the true evilness within him.