Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

For our film opening, we felt that the most appropriate audience would be teenagers and young adults between the ages of 15-25.  We have therefore decided to give our film a 15 certificate as it contains strong language, strong violence and scenes that some viewers may find distressing. We felt like it was too explicit to be a 12 or 12A, and also we would be limiting our intended audience if we made it an 18. As well as this, we think it would appeal to both genders, as there is a possibility to sympathise with the victims but also to find out the story behind the serial killer that is revealed in the opening sequence.

 

 

With this audience that we have chosen, they usually use watching films as a sense of escapism from their lives of being a student, university graduate or in full time employment.  From the opening sequence that we created, we feel that this audience would be encouraged to watch the entire film, and enjoy it.

 

With the characters, we chose the actors for several reasons whilst baring in mind the audience that we have chosen to aim our media product at. From the research that we did, we saw that a lot of the victims in horror films were females and that the attackers were males.  Below I have included some examples of females that have played the role of the victim in a horror film.

 

 

Therefore we decided to stick with the trend and produce the same actors so that we could ensure the same audience.  By sticking with the pattern, it would be hopeful that the same audience would be targeted and attracted due to the likely characters and also the situation that they are in.  Below I have talked about the characters we have used and why we have used them for our opening sequence in relation to our target audience.

 

Actress:

 

For the victim, we chose a female actress to play this role as females are very vulnerable in this situation.  As you can see, throughout the duration of our opening sequence, all the victims were females which shows a pattern of the serial killer.  We felt this would also be of interest to the target audience that we have chosen.  One of the feelings that we wanted to portray throughout the film was sympathy for the victims that have been killed, as well as trying to work out why the serial killer is the way he is.  

Actor:

 

We chose the serial killer to be a teenage boy, as it is unusual to have a female in this situation.  Also, a male would be much more cunning in the way they handle this situation, and we felt that a male would be much more efficient at this role than a female.  Due to this, we felt like the age group of our audience would be interested in the storyline of a male turning into a serial killer, as they would be interested to see how the story plans out and possibly the individual story behind the male as to why he may be like this.