Who are your audience and what have you learned from them?

Evaluation Task 4 -

Target Audience In our audience research we found only slight differences

between male and female statistics. This suggested our film should be targeted at both males and females. There was a

significant difference in opinions of young people and people over 21 which lead us to the conclusion that our target

audience should be young adults.

Genre and Audience Appeal

As we were planning to do a horror film, we decided to dedicate half of the questions on our research survey purely to the horror genre.

When we asked which type of horror film people prefer, we found that 60% of people taking part chose the paranormal category compared

to the 20% who chose Slasher and 20% preferring torture. The supernatural genre is the popular of all the horror sub-genres so we

decided to include more supernatural conventions in our film

Audience Theory

Gratification Theory Bulmer & Kats (1974) came up with reasons why audiences use media:1) Diversion - Used as a diversion to escape from everyday

pressures. E.g. if a child is having a hard time at school they might like to watch films to forget about bullying for a while.

2) Personal Relationships - Sociability through discussion about media products. E.g. Not many people go to watch horror films by themselves as they like to discuss the film with another person.

3) Personal Identity - Ability to compare ones own life with events/characters.

4) Surveillance – information gathering

Hypodermic Needle Theory

There is thought to be two types of Audience which are passive and active. Passive

audiences believe everything they see in the media, whereas active audiences think about what they are seeing and try to understand the meaning behind it. The hypodermic needle theory says that the

mass audience are passive and the media aims to inject ideas into a passive audience.

In this sense, horror films can be quite dangerous as a passive audience are

unlikely to challenge what they see and can be easily manipulated by the violence they see. As children are more gullible they are more likely to take disturbing things they

see in films as the norm. This is why many horror films have an age restriction of 15 .

The Jamie Bulger case is an example of this. Two young boys brutally murdered a 2 year

old boy after watching and taking inspiration from the film ‘Child’s Play’. The BBFC then

brought in new regulations for home cinema under the Video Recordings Act 1984 which meant that videos had to be submitted for

classifications.

Representations and Genre

• Usually, young females in films are portrayed as victims, especially in horror films where they are seen as vulnerable. In our trailer we have used this representation so that the audience sympathise with the victim.

• Another representation commonly shown in horror films, is a child as the villain. Through our audience research, we found that evil innocent children were very popular with our target audience. We used this in our own trailer and found that it was succuessful

FeedbackWe gave out a questionnaire to a group of 10 males and 11 females after

they viewed North Chamber. We wanted to find out whether the trailer was easy to understand and whether the genre was clear in the final cut of the

trailer.

In the questionnaire we asked the audience to outline the storyline of the trailer so that we know they understood it. We picked out the main aspects of the story that people wrote about and put them in a bar chart.

The results showed that the whole group picked up on the fact Cassandra was bullied and also that her ghost haunts the school. The majority of the group noticed that the spirit was released by Cassandra’s journal.However, the issue of suicide in the film was only realised by 4 people.

We found that our trailer made the female audience

jump more than males, suggesting our film was

more effective with a female audience.

We also asked which parts of the trailer made the

audience jump and found that the most effective

‘jumpy’ part of the trailer was the store cupboard door

slam scene.

The aim of a trailer is to make the audience want to go and see a film at

the cinema.

Everyone who watched our film trailer said that they would pay to see

the full film which is very pleasing and suggests we have succeeded in making a trailer that

entices an audience to watch our film.

Skills Development

This year, we have gone into more depth with our research of issues included in our film. For example,

we researched WW2 and looked at local cases of suicide. I think this made our storyline stronger as

we were confident about the issues we were showing in the trailer.

I have learnt that promotion and marketing of a trailer is extremely important when trying to gain a wide audience. We have used social media which has helped us gain a significant amount of views

compared to our AS opening scene.

I have also developed my planning skills whilst making this trailer as I have learnt to make professional looking scripts and call

sheets which have helped us whilst filming.

Lastly, my editing skills have improved a lot since last year. I am more confident in using various tools on Pinnacle Studios and I think

that is reflected in our trailer.

Was your trailer successful?

The fact that every person that saw the trailer wanted to see the full film suggests

that our trailer was successful.Our audience feedback suggested that our trailer was scary and easy to understand

which was our main aim when planning to make the trailer.