Media Studies Evaluation Q5

Question: How did you attract/address your audience?

Our target audience for our media product are Males over 35, during our research and planning we interviewed one of our school's ICT teachers; Mr. Healy, who not only fits the categories for our demographics but he also fits our prime target social class (A/B). We did the interview so that we could find out about general interests of someone in our demographics so that we could adapt our film so that it would appeal to more people and attract a larger audience. From the results of our interview we managed to grab a general guess at what our target audience's views on what certain aspects of media are such as TV, Music and other Films.

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. From our interview with Mr. Healy, we found out from his answers that his interest in music is very widely ranged, he'll listen to almost all genres of music and he does prefer the more old-style jazz music, more specifically when it's included in older films which, we found, actually relate to our genre but mentioned about how he also had a interest in Jazz music that has a sort of Modern-techno twist, which sounds like something that would tie into an similar genre of music, Electro-swing.

Mr. Healy also told us about his interest in Detective/deduction type shows such as CSI or Elementary (the American version of the BBC series 'Sherlock') although 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, a good example for this would be shows such as Bones or Greys Anatomy.

As well as Film Noir, 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 (such as the Paranormal Activity series or the Scream series films) have a very low interest with Mr. Healy, or more-so a dislike for them.

The impact these results had on how we attracted and addressed our target audience meant that we could take use these results as an extremely rough guideline as to what people who like film noir are interested in, in terms of different forms of media which meant that we could adapt our film so that it will include the right elements to properly attract a possibly larger audience towards our film.

So that we could secure a good audience for our film, we needed to add some elements into the film opening that would intrigue our target audience to capture our audiences attention, edging them to want to carry on watching the film. To do this we added some elements of Enigma into the film, such as: Keeping the murderer as only a silhouette so that the audience get curious about who he is, what he looks like etc.

For the Promotion of our film, we would try to promote it around places such as newspapers (Readers such as the Telegraph, the Guardian etc), Film Magazines, possibly music magazines (if we were to try and promote the music used in the film). Because our target audience is more of a niche audience, it would normally only attract high standard audiences who have a distinct like for certain genres of film.