Planning - Target audience

Every film has a target audience which helps plan a film and make the film. Without a target audience it would be hard to plan a film as no there would be no one the film is aimed at. The target audience helps the production; distribution; marketing and exhibition. The target audience helps influence the: mise en scene; sound; editing and even camera angles. An example of this would be a crime thriller; the writer may want the crime to be a gun crime instead of a poisoning murder if the age group is around 18-21 and so on as they are more likely to watch the film and be interested.

We decided our thriller target audience should be 15-20 years as the marketing of the thriller would be easier and cheaper as our target audience could be easily accessed and informed throught social networking sites such as facebook and twitter. We also thought this age group would be a good choice as we live in urban area (north and south London) and therefore we can get easy access to and would know places which would be eye catching to the audience.

Our target audience would also be for both males and females as we want as much audience as possible. There is no specific religion or ethnicity as our main audience would be in Britain where there is a mix and is a multi cultural society. We have thought that the working class youths would be more interested in our film as they are the ones who have the time to come out with their friends and watch this thriller; they are also the ones who would relate to our characters as our characters would mostly be from a working class background.

By having a rough idea of our target audience we would understand what sort of language and vocabulary we would use. We are more likely to use high frequency lexis if our target audience are from working class backgrounds as they need to understand the words that are used. Additionally we would use some low frequency lexis due to the age group as many 15-20 year olds do have an education therefore are capable of understanding these words. We would also add slang so that the thriller is not too formal or boring for the audience.

Overall our target audience is:
- 15-20years
- Male&Female
- British citizens
- Working class

From other research:

I found that the target of many psychological thrillers are 18+ because it includes a lot of violence and issues which may be disturbing for younger viewers. There are however usually warnings written at the start of the film on the cover. There is a target audience which aims to attract 15+ males and females (similarly like our thriller) who like psychological thrillers. The reason why the film may have the rating of 15+ may be because the movie will contain only aspects of violence; death and issues however it will not be extremely disturbing.