Discuss the importance of the audience to media products and media industries in

general.

Why does the film industry spend so much time and money test screening films to invited audiences or finding out what

audiences like through market research?

The film industry spends a lot of time and money on test screenings to invited audiences and market research as they need to find out what their target audience is for their film and how they react to them. They need to know what the audience like about the film and whether it will be successful in the cinema. Also, they want to know what appeals to them as they can include as much of this as they can in the filmt to appeal a mass target audience. For example, if their target audience is 15-25 year olds and through market research they find out that social media is the main way they find out about new films they may decide to focus on increasing the amount of advertising they put on social media. Another reason for the film industry to use market research is so they know where there movie will fit in the market. They could release it in cinema, box office, straight to DVD or online sites such as NetFlix.

Our target audience for our film is 15-25 year olds and contains both male and females, with females slightly topping the males. This is due to the doll feature of the film – this may not appeals to males as much as they might not feel this is a scary feature.

To find out the target audience for similar films to ours we used Pearl and Deans website. We looked at the film Annabelle as it is a horror film which also uses a doll as its unique selling point.

We found out that the main audience was 15-24 year olds and the next popular age range was 26-34 year olds so a fairly young audience.

Who are your audience?

After this we used a questionnaire to ask our target audience what they liked/disliked about horror films.

At what stages did you ask your audience questions or get their feedback?

We asked for feedback at three stages. We did three screenings and got feedback from our target audience after each of these. At the first screening we had just put the clips together and added a few titles so the feedback was just to see whether they liked the initial clips we had chosen. On our second screening we gained more detailed feedback. At this stage we had added sound, filters, more titles and transitions. We gained feedback on what worked well any improvements. One improvement we made was to make it clear who maddies character was. This lead to us doing some re filming. We did a final screening in which we presented all 3 of our products to our target audience to get their opinion.

This is a screenshot of our first rough cut which we showed to our target audience.

We used a questionnaire to get feedback we thought this worked well as it could cover a lot of subjects for example mise en scene, camerawork, sound and editing. It was also easy to analyse and we could gather a lot of feedback in a short amount of time. We distributed these questionnaires to males and females in our target audience age range after they had watched our teaser trailer. On the second and third screening we included the poster and magazine in our feedback.

How did you use this feedback? Was it useful? Did you make any changes to your work because of it?

• The audience feedback we achieved from the first viewing of our rough cut of 'Adeline‘ was fairly positive, they said that it clearly conveyed the horror/thriller genre through the use of the doll and the eerie tone. The main strengths identified were our use of sound; especially the baby crying that was identified as being very realistic. The use of costume and make up made the trailer look authentic and added to the horror conventions. The improvements we were told we could make were too add more titles and to add some more shots; both of these were said to make it clearer who the doll was and how she got in the house as at the moment it was a little unclear. From this feedback we added more titles and did some re-filming to gain more appropriate shots which set the scene better. This was helpful as after we had added the new shots we felt it looked a lot better than the original.

• When we were constantly looking at the film we couldn’t see where we needed improvements but a new pair of eyes meant they could pick out things that we hadn't and as they were our target audience it meant that we could change our film to appeal to them more.