WHO WOULD BE THE AUDIENCE FOR YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT?

HOW DID YOU ADDRESS/ATTRACT YOUR AUDIENCE?

Evaluation Josie Askem

Q4 & 5

CASTING

The teenage female in our production is the main protagonist, we chose to cast her so that the film would appeal to a younger audience. The main

audience of psychological thrillers tends to be women, and therefore casting a woman for the leading role,

will attract them.We also did it because we wanted to go against the

convention of having a male lead role. Mulvey’s theory suggests that the media is controlled

by men (The Male Gaze), and that women are presented as men see them – we wanted to go against

this whole theory and therefore tried to make the female role come across as a pluralistic view of a

teenager.The male role is played by an older man, however we

did plan to cast a teenage boy so that it would attract a younger audience. We changed this, and cast an

middle-aged man to bring in an older audience too, as well as it creating a more questioning scene.

TARGET AUDIENCE

I found that most of the people that enjoy watching films are older people, 60% of those being female.

With this in mind, we decided that our audience would be late teens to middle-aged people to attract as many

people as possible. By it being made with this age group in mind, attracting them will mean we would

make a larger profit from our film. This is furthered by being able to advertise via social media sites, (which

our target audience tend to be on very often), which is free and therefore would increase our profit.

CODES AND CONVENTIONS

Our film includes a lot of common codes and conventions of psychological thrillers to bring it to the

attention of people who regularly watch this type of film, as well as our target audience.

An example of this would be, Barthes’ theory of hermeneutic codes (making the audience question

things happening) which we used by having the characters play Russian Roulette with no explanation. We also included white text on a black background for

our credits, which is another convention. To make our piece more original, we challenged a few

conventions such as choosing to include an actual weapon (a gun in our case), where most psychological thrillers leave the real weapon to be the killers mind.

USES AND GRATIFICATION THEORY

Originally, the uses and gratification theory arose in the 1940s but has been changed about as times change (in

the 70s and 80s). This theory is about how and why people actively seek out specific media and is

positivistic in it’s approach. It assumes that audience members are not passive consumers of media, but

actually have an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives.

For example for our opening, people who regularly watch psychological thrillers would seek out our film as

it is the genre that they are familiar with.

MISE EN SCENE

Looking at statistics, the gun (which is our main prop) would appeal more to men than women. The research shows men react better to action and violence in films and TV, than women do. This suggests our use of the

gun should keep male readers engaged. The teenage female is dressed in a hoodie, which we hope will also help appeal to a younger audience, as

they could relate to her costume. The older man is dressed in a suit, which is more mature and should help us attract an older/more

mature audience – this would mean our viewership is fairly large.