Who are your audience and what have you learned from your

audience feedback?Francesca Roncoli

Intended outcome of production• The intended outcome of our production was to produce a horror trailer

to attract our target audience 15-25. I believe we were successful in doing so and this success is evident through our audience feedback. The genre was denoted through many techniques, from characters and lighting to mixed pace editing. I believe creating a twitter page for our film massively helped in the promotion of our film as teenagers (our audience) flock to social media websites and therefore it is a convenient and low cost method of advertisement.

Who are our audience?• When researching into target audiences, we found, through

our questionnaire, that those who wanted a horror genre with a female antagonist were both males and females ages 15-25. Bearing this in mind we decided to go ahead with the horror genre. I believe that targeting an audience of our age was extremely useful for our production as we could relate to them, we know what attracts them, and therefore they can relate to our production.

Genre and Audience appeal• The genre triangle proposes the idea that

audience, institution and texts are all reliant on each other. The genre attracts the audience which in return produces money for the production company which is then used to make more films specific to that genre. Bearing that in mind it is imperative to identify your genre as you can then market it in a certain way which attracts the audience. For example those interested in the horror genre may expect to see horror conventions e.g. blood and the supernatural. The most revealing question on our questionnaire is the one in which identified the audiences favourite genre. We all agreed that we should then go ahead with this genre as we had an interest in it therefore we are more motivated and creative with our ideas and we since we were the same age as our target audience could produce a trailer in a way that we ourselves would like and therefore our audience.

Uses and Gratification Theory- Blumler and Katz

The uses and gratification theory proposes the idea that audiences have certain needs that media seeks to gratify:

Diversion Personal relationships and social interaction Personal identity Surveillance

This theory focuses on the audience and the idea that people use media rather than media effecting people. Unlike hypodermic needle theory which states audiences are passive uses and gratification theory suggests audiences take an active role in interpreting and then conducting media into their lives. The theory also suggests that audiences select media to meet their needs/gratify them.

Diversion and Personal Relationships

• Diversion refers to the audiences needs to escape from their everyday life and so use the media to gratify these needs, and everyday example of this is coming home from work and watching TV as a way of relaxing. Our piece of media is a diversion for audiences as it is so dissimilar to everyday life and therefore can be used as a method of escaping.

• Personal Relationships refer to the idea that people use media to gratify their need for companionship and to form relationships. An everyday example of this is going to the cinema to watch a film with a friend and therefore building and forming relationships.

Personal Identity and Surveillance

• The personal identity aspect of the theory relates to audiences using media to find out about themselves certain audiences relate to certain pieces of media and in a way, reflect that audience.

• Surveillance refers to using media to monitor what’s going on in the world. The news acts as a way or monitoring life as does reality TV programs such as Big Brother

Hypodermic Needle Theory • The theory states that media products can influence a mass

audience by ‘injecting’ them with certain messages through media to gain a desired response. This theory works on the assumption that audiences are passive and therefore unable to resist the impact of media and its message. The passive audience have messages injected into their mind which ultimately leads to an influence over their actions.

• Children are particularly passive in relation to media and thus we have rated our film 15 (that contains threats of horror) in order to prevent the plot from affecting audiences.

The Case of James Bulger• When under trial for the murder of James Bulger the judge

suggested 'exposure to violent videos' may have influenced the boys' behaviour. This could be linked to hypodermic needle theory as it was said Thompson and Venables watched Child’s play 3 which features films of graphic violence.

Genre Representations

• In many ways we adhered to the conventions of horror, the chiaroscuro lighting, the eerie soundtrack etc. However we challenged certain conventions with our antagonist Evelyn, usually women are seen to be the more submissive and weaker sex, however in our trailer Evelyn is dominant and menacing although not a typical convention a female antagonist is prevalent in a lot of horrors, for example the grudge.

Audience Feedback• We conducted a focus group to gain some insight into the success of our

trailer. We asked certain questions to see if we fulfilled the purpose of our trailer ‘to make an entertaining trailer with clear conventions that attracts audiences’. Asking them questions such as ‘what genre is this?’ and ‘would you see this film?’ let us know if we met our target. We received really positive feedback from the focus group with 100% identifying the correct genre and the majority saying they would see the film. The minority who wouldn’t didn’t like horror as a genre. This was extremely pleasing for our group and from this feedback I’d say we targeted the correct audience as we knew what they liked and therefore they related to our production.

Focus group

Skills Development and Audience• I believe my skills have developed massively from AS to A2, I have learned

not only about conventions and genres but how to use them in an effective and creative way. Looking at genre, in my AS coursework although the genre was evident it didn’t carry many of the conventions that make it interesting. I believe at A2 I have developed a further understanding as to what makes films/genres appealing. I believe by studying theorist such as Rick Altman who suggests genre is defined by it semantic elements ( eg knives, blood, eerie music) which are instantly recognisable for audiences and syntactic elements which refers to the themes in a film eg revenge I have gained a wider knowledge as to how these elements work and incorporated them into our film. Whereas at AS level I hadn’t looked in depth at what makes a genre a genre. In terms of genre and it’s conventions I believe my progression is evident, as within my A2 we’ve used both semantic and syntactic elements and thoroughly explored them, whereas at AS they were more bland and didn’t really connote any themes. I believe developing my knowledge of genre contributed to the production and ultimately helped towards getting the feedback we did and thus enticing an audience.

Skills Development

• I believe I developed in terms of mise en scene due to the fact last years production was filmed in broad daylight, in a nice neighbourhood and didn’t particularly conform to the conventions of a thriller. Also last year I believe we didn’t particularly vary the setting in the sense that it was all done in one location in different places but other than that there was no real variation. However this year we ensured we were filming in lots of different settings with the appropriate mise en scene. One scene I’m particularly pleased with is the one with Evelyn cackling on the chair as she rocks back and fourth, for this scene we had to wait for darkness and use portable flash light to create the effect we did. I believe this shows a true development in terms of planning and creativity.

Was our trailer successful?• I believe our trailer was succesful in meeting its intended

purpose. I hoped this year the genre would be clearly denoted and the production would be to a very high standard. I think we achieved this and we can see we did so through our audience feedback. Genre and audiences are closely linked according to Ryall’s genre triangle which we incorporated into our production. Overall I am extremely pleased with our trailer which this year was thoroughly planned out and was a lot more in depth with our syntactic elements being a lot more prevalent than they were last year (the theme of fear was denoted throughout our production when last year it was lacking these themes)