Media Studies Evaluation Q4

Question: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our film is mainly aimed at the older audience members as there is a better chance that they'd be more familiar with the film genre, our target audience being males 35+ with a social class of around A/B (with occupations such as Teachers, Doctors, Bankers etc.)

We chose the more older target audience considering that film noir is one of the oldest genres which has slowly, over time, become less popular. After looking at data from the UK film council (http:// media2012-ltilbury-h140.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/target-audience-stats-for-our-genre.html) we found that these demographics (Males, 35+, A/B) were the most popular for our genre, most likely because they find the conventions of the genre more interesting than others.

Using the pictures above, it shows that only 10% of people who attend the cinema would prefer to watch the genre and only a mere 1% would say that film noir is their favourite genre. Out of the original 10% of the audience, the gender by age that watched/enjoyed it more was only 13% of men age 35+, also, of the 1% that said film noir was their favourite, 2% of them were also men aged 35+, But this didn't narrow our audience down to one category completely as there are still some elements in film noir that might still appeal to a very small minority of younger audiences.

Upon deciding our film audiences, we had to consider the BBFC classification. From our deduction, we ruled our film opening as a 15 as we thought this would be the best age rating considering there are scenes which show blood and talk of violence which isn't suitable for young ages. This did help narrow down possible options for a target audience however we could have followed the average film noir classifications.

After the popularity for Film Noir became less popular, most major cinemas had to stop showing them in fear of gradually adapting a loss in profit once people had stopped coming to see film noir's as often as they used to so the genre was left only to be played in independent cinemas, Because of this lack of film noir's showing in cinemas and the decrease in the audience, this introduced film noir into targeting more niche audiences as time went on, this is widely confirmed in the UK film council information and as well as looking into different film distributors, as there was quite a low percentage of all audiences that actually liked film noir and not many film distributors specialize in film noir anymore. This does have an effect on how we could establish our target audience as this narrowed down the number of people who would be generally interested in the film.

We interviewed a possible member of our target audience, Mr. Healy who is age 35+ and considering his occupation of a teacher, falls directly into our preferred demographics for our target audience.

We asked Mr. Healy about what his favourite type of music, TV and films were and what he liked about each category and what they didn't like on each subject, he'll listen to almost all genres of music and he does prefer the more old-style jazz music specifically when it's included in older films. He also had a interest in Jazz music that has a sort of Modern-techno twist.

He also told us about his interest in Detective/deduction type shows such as CSI or Elementary and how he detests programs that include unwanted or unnecessary information and events in them such as relationships included in a TV show which has no need for it.

Mr. Healy also enjoys action films such as Bladerunner, Indiana Jones and to be more specific, films that have been directed by Ridley Scott such as Alien etc. Unrealistic Horror films with a supernatural style.