Our Target Audience and Genre Conventions

For our Thriller film we have decided on a target audience,

 

To be specific our target audience will mostly be:

• 15+
• Males and Females
• Male and Female Students as it will relate to them more, but also 18+ people who have got normal working class jobs.
• People who are interested in Thriller Films, and like the sense of mystery in films. Also being on the edge of their seat during a film, and people who go home and still think about the film once they have seen it.

The certificate of our film will be a 15. This is because we feel that our thriller would contain scenes that would not be suitable for children under 15 to watch. We think that some scenes may be too disturbing, and scare them. Also our thriller will contain mild swearing.
We have planned to meet the expectations and interests of our audience in many ways. We have planned our opening sequence many times and have thought of as many possible ways to grab our audience in the opening 2 mins. To meet their expectations we have watched many other thrillers and analysed them to see what works and what doesn't. Following this we asked many people in our target audience what they like about thrillers and we have tried to transfer their thoughts into our opening sequence. We have tried to match our audience's interests by making our storyline relevant to what they like to see. Also we will try and get our audience involved by using current issues and events in their everyday lives to help our thriller appear more interesting and appealing to them.
We have considered our audience when planning our thriller by doing many questionnaires as already stated we asked people in our target audience what they like and dislike about thriller films. We have also done questionnaires on what title they preferred (see post Ideas For The Title Of Our Thriller). We also did questionnaires to see what font for the title our target audience preferred. We did some research which showed us what age certificates some thriller films were given. This advised us what age certificate to put on our thriller film.
Our chosen target audience would be encouraged to watch our thriller as it involves people of their own age, so they can relate to them. Also it is not a full on scary thriller, it holds a sense of mystery and this is different to many other thrillers.

To target our selected audience, we will make sure that adverts pop up on msn, facebook and all other social networking sites, that the age group will know. We will also have the trailers appear on the television, but obviously on at a time suitable, just so that children are not scared.

 

Genre Conventions

Our thriller stands out as being original and unique, and this is because it does not have the same storyline as many other thrillers and we have aslo used actors of a younger age, which is not normally seen.
Our thriller meets the conventions of the thriller genre in man ways. For example it includes;

•  A flashback scene
• Black and White scenes
• A morally ambiguous charatcer
• A vunrable character
• Action being built up in a number of ways
• A soundtrack which fits the scene and genre

 The planning of our thriller matches the ideas of some of the other thriller opening sequences that we have watched, for example we have built up the action and suspense very quickly just like it does in The Usual Suspects.
We have also included the sense of confusion and anticipation like it does in Psycho.