This document discusses the target audience and testing for a horror media product called "Overseer". The target audience is Caucasian males aged 15-24 who enjoy "tasteful horror" and Nordic noir films. Characters and themes were designed to appeal to this audience by featuring a male protagonist they can relate to and incorporating elements of the popular Nordic noir genre. Throughout production, the creators tested concepts on their target audience through surveys, pitches, rough cuts, and final cut feedback sessions to refine the film based on audience response. The final testing showed the audience understood the storyline and were engaged enough to want to see what happens next.

1. Q4 & Q5
Who would be the audience for your media product?
How did you attract/address your audience?

2. Core Target Audience
Demographics of target audience:
•Caucasian – The majority of the population of England are Caucasian and since we were
trying to make the film as relatable to the audience as possible we used a Caucasian
actor, therefore the media product is aimed at Caucasians (although there is nothing in it
that would insult or not appeal to people of other ethnicities, we hope)
•Male – We decided to break the conventional use of young attractive “Damsel-in-distress”
women as our protagonist but to rather use a male character, and explore how even men
who are stereotypically shown as macho and emotionless can feel terror and sadness.
•Aged 15-24 – the majority of horror fans are this age.
•English (Not Danish as the subtitles are for English-reading viewers only and when the
film is in the viewers first language it loses a certain thrill or element of intrigue and style)
Psychographics of target audience:
•“Tasteful horror” fans – our target audience don’t enjoy “torture porn”-style open gore and
carnage, rather they prefer films which scare them in new, creative ways that don’t involve
ump scare after jump scare, separated with the savage dismemberment of an attractive
woman.
•“Nordic Noir” fans – these are fans of the increasingly popular “Nordic Noir” genre of
predominantly TV shows based in Scandinavia (largely Sweden and Denmark). Shows
such as “The Killing”, “The Bridge” and to an extent “Borgen”, made the genre famous and
this is something we are playing upon with the language choice of our film opening.

3. How do the Characters appeal to the Target
Audience
•Same gender – The protagonist is male, which is the same as the target audiences gender. This is in the hopes of
creating an intriguing, likeable character that the audience can relate to.
•Fans of NN – As Nordic noir has become increasingly popular across the UK and America we chose to capitalise
on this and appeal to the niche audience that enjoy media texts of that genre. By creating a media text that interests
a relatively small group of people we hope to utilise the entire fanbase of the genre by being one of the few films
available (if this had been feature length) that blends Nordic Noir with other genres, essentially creating a cult
following.
•Underdog – It’s said that “Everyone likes an underdog” and our protagonist is very much that, being controlled by
the cold, powerful, mysterious “Overseer”. We see that he feels lost and terrified, and more than a little weak, so he
s understandably very much the underdog. However he has a spark in him that suggests he is going to fight back
and hopefully get justice, something which we all agreed was inspirational to an extent and was entertaining to
watch.
•Intriguing villain – Film fans of every kind were enthralled by Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the infamous “Joker” from
the Batman franchise. He was a different kind of villain who described himself perfectly as “An Agent of Chaos”,
nsinuating he does what he does without rhyme or reason, hence the scenes in which he burns his money after
sliding off it and lets the Batman live despite having outplayed him eventually. We would have looked into the
antagonists reasons and mentality to hopefully create a villain that was as interesting and terrifying at the same
time, which would very much appeal to our target audience.

4. How did you test your Concept on your
Target Audience throughout the process
•Survey monkey – We created a survey on SurveyMonkey.Com which allowed us to quiz the audience and get their
opinion on a number of questions such as “What do you think the film would be about, just from the title?” and
“Which of these do you think would be the most fitting main character [teenage girl/boy, young boy/girl etc]”. This
allowed us to make a few changes to our piece and to give us a glimpse of our target audiences mindset which
hopefully meant the changes we made, such as our title, would have a more significant effect on the audience. We
distributed this survey across social media, using “shares” to reach people out of our contact, gaining a total of over
60 replies.
•Pitch – Using the feedback from the survey and a number of other factors such as an in-depth explanation of each
section of our production process. This gave us a far more in-depth, interactive mode of audience testing as a large
number of the people present at the pitch were of our target audience. From this we made a number of changes and
had to make many technical considerations, for example how to film the TV sequence without getting significant
flickering.
•Rough cut feedback – We showed the class our rough cut and received a large amount of helpful, valid feedback
that highlighted the areas we needed to focus on changing, as we knew we were going to have to reshoot at a later
date and we would not have time to make a second reshoot if the same problems occurred.
•Final cut feedback – We held a group feedback session after we had exported our (hopefully) final cut and recieved
a large amount of really positive feedback from the group who all seemed to enjoy it. Interestingly it produced a
surprising amount of controversy about the effect of the “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” music, some finding it incredibly
chilling as we had hoped and some finding it funny.

5. Final cut feedback
1. Would you continue watching? – A resounding yes.
2. What was the storyline? – A man suffers from amnesia (mostly correct).
3. Did you find it scary? – A good, disgusted reaction to the “5” on the hand, mixed reactions to the “Teddy Bair’s
Picnic” music.
4. Would you watch a foreign subtitled film now? – Mostly yes, a few people have never enjoyed them and said no.
5. What happens next? – He gets controlled by Overseer (correct).
6. Does this remind you of any other films? – “Saw” to an extent (masked villain, gore on hand), one thought of
“Memento” which the others had not heard of.
7. What was the title? (we asked this because there was some confusion from a teacher as the title is somewhat
more subtle than conventional horror films) – Overseer (correct).
Our final audience testing demonstrated that we were successful in appealing to our target audience.