Audience Research

For the preparation of my media product I made a draft film poster for my trailer 'BEHIND THE SHADOWS' which was evaluated by the class, on not only the image but also the narrative. The class then voted on which 'film' they would want to see the most, and my poster won with 11/15 people in class voting to see my media product. This helped me to understand what the audience wanted to see from horror trailers, the main thing that the class picked up on was the mysterious image, and suspenseful narrative.

We then when on to analysing real horror trailers, in order to gain inspiration for our own media products, these helped us to understand how successful trailers are constructed and again what the 'horror audience' were after. Once the media product had been created we all shew our trailers in class in a focus group screening and an evaluation group screening, by doing this I was able to understand what the audience liked and did not like about my media product, and what I could do to improve it so that it would appeal to my audience more.

The target audience of my media product was split 50/50 between male and female as the genre of my trailer was a psychological thriller, I thought that it would appeal to both the male and female audience. The audience age range for my media product was 15-35 year old's which is why my media product was rated a certificate 15, we were able to have a fairly low age certificate as there are only minor hints of gore, that are sometimes hidden by restricted narration. To target my audience I kept the media product very suspenseful and added small hints of gore to add some extra effects to the media product and maybe reach out to a wider audience to what I was initially targeting for.

Although I did a lot of research into other media products and what the audience wanted, it could not always be perfect due to polysemy. Everyone likes different things in horror, and according to psychographics most horror fans are reformers and individuals which are social groups that are very hard to appeal to, compared to the mainstream audience who are a lot easier to appeal to. When we were watching horror trailers for our research in class even some of the class disagreed with each other on points such as; some of the class found the ending of PSYCHO (1960) very chilling, and disturbing where as other members of the class found the ending funny when Norman came out dressed as a woman. There are points with in my own trailer that the audience disagreed on, with my initial draft poster the majority of the class said that they thought the narrative was really good, and they would enjoy watching it yet when they watched the actual product some of the class said that they couldn't really understand the narrative, although they did feel the music created good suspense. To improve upon this I shot some more scenes to help improve the narrative which it did, for some people, but I think that, and the rest of the class thought that the narrative wasn't hard to understand.