Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

First of all, our target audiences are:

• Fans of action films (Primary)
• 15-40 year old men and women (Secondary)
• British Audiences (Tertiary)

One thing which helped us to attract my audience was the uses and gratification theory. This included four reasons as to why someone would watch or read something: Escapism,  Interaction, Personal Identity and Surveillance.

Escapism was probably the most prominent gratification in our final product; our film opening had a quiet surreal look to it and the setting was definitely out of the ordinary - it features an ex-cop trying to get back his kidnapped fiancée at a back-alley poker game. The film also alludes to some action later on in the film, with Jen and Blake breaking into a police station.

I think the action in our film, mainly the shooting, would have definitely appealed to all of our target audiences as through our research we found that action was the most popular genre by far, even though it was slightly skewed towards men than women. The shooting, although it was somewhat provoked, was meant to be a surprise to the audience; Jen just had to feel a sense of threat and she would shoot these two men, making her seem as an extreme sort of character - although this could have confused our audiences, which I will talk about later in this post.

I think the characters will be very relatable to some areas of the audience. Blake, is a middle aged, middle class man, and is supposed to appeal to the masses. Jen on the other hand breaks the conventions of female characters usually being damsels in distress, and is a strong female character who can look out for herself. Through her tough personality and actions she is supposed to be aspirational for the females in our target audience. Both of these characters are also crucial to the development of a strong narrative in our film, which I think will also be something that will draw people in, particularly the older end of our target audience.

We conducted a survey to gather information on audience feedback. First we asked what the respondents age and gender were. As expected, males watched the film more than females; this is because although action is a genre with a wide appeal, it is slightly skewed towards men. The ages we got responses from were in between 13 and 55, with the majority being 13-24. The age results did not reflect the previous data we had found while doing research, but this is probably due to the small scale of our research in comparison; as we were limited to the people we could ask, we were going to get more younger people, since we knew more younger people than older people.

 

previous data we                                Two pie charts, showing our newly gathered info

 had found

We also asked them what they liked about the film and got these responses:

The feedback was positive overall, with respondents praising many different aspects of the film. I think this is proof that we have managed to successfully appeal to our target audience; however if I were to do this project again, I think I would probably make the plot more clear, since as it starts in the middle of an event (Blake at a poker game) it may confuse the audience.