This document summarizes the audience research and testing conducted for a short horror film project. It describes the target audience as 16-24 year old English or Danish speaking males interested in tasteful horror and Nordic noir genres. It explains how the main character appeals to this audience by being relatable and an underdog. The villain aims to be intriguing like Heath Ledger's Joker. Audience testing through surveys, feedback sessions, and a final cut screening showed that viewers understood the plot and found elements scary, suggesting the target audience was successfully appealed to.

1. 4/5 Who would be
the audience for
your media product?
How did you
attract/ address
your audience?

2. Core Target Audience
Demographics: 16-24 – Male – English speaking or Danish
Caucasian (majority of England; relate to Caucasian
actor)
Psychographics: ‘Tasteful horror’ fans – not into torture porn
gore; we can scare them by creative, not
stereotypically gory horror
‘Nordic-Noir’ fans – the genre became
increasingly popular in Scandinavia (largely Sweden
& Denmark). We played on this with the use of our
language choice
.e.g. The Killing, The Bridge & Borgen

3. How do the characters appeal to
this target audience?
Male and same age: Alex’s character is quite relatable as he
is the same demographic as our target
audience (male teenager)
Fans of NN: (Nordic Noir) Appeals to the fans (niche
audience) of this increasingly popular
genre. By creating a media text that
interests a relatively small group of people
we hope to gain interest of the entire
fanbase (of Nordic Noir) by being one of the
few films available (if this was a feature-
length film) that blends Nordic Noir with
other genres, essentially creating a cult
following.

4. How do the characters appeal to
this target audience?
Underdog: There is a saying ‚Everyone likes an
underdog‛; our protagonist reflects this as
he is being controlled by the masked, cold,
powerful, mysterious ‘Overseer’. We see
him lost, terrified and weak. However, there
is a spark in him that suggested he was a
fighter & was going to get justice; this
empowerment (high-angle) within the
protagonist which is not shown consistently
is inspiring to an extent.

5. How do the characters appeal to
this target audience?
Intriguing Villain: Films 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 (‚An Agent Of
Chaos‛) who does things without rhyme or
reason (he burns his money and lets Batman
live despite having outplayed him
eventually. We look into the antagonists
reasons & hopefully create an interesting
character that is also terrifying; this
character would appeal to the target
audience.

6. How did you test your concept
and sequence to an audience
throughout the process?
Surveymonkey – This allowed us to quiz the audience & get
their opinion on our initial concepts (‚What do you think
our film would be about, just from the title?‛). This
allowed us to make a few changes to our piece; the changes
we made (such as our title) would have a more significant
effect on the audience. We used social media to distribute
the survey using ‘shares’ & gained a total of 60+
replies.
Pitch - This gave us a far more in-depth,
interactive mode audience sample as the majority of the
audience at the pitch were our target audience; the
feedback was useful. From this feedback, technical
considerations were made such as how to film the TV
sequence without significant flickering.

7. How did you test your concept
and sequence to an audience
throughout the process?
Rough Cut Feedback – (Via YouTube) We showed the class
our rough cut and received really useful feedback to
highlight any areas that needed changing; we knew we were
going to reshoot and didn’t have the time to reshoot
twice.
Final Cut Feedback - We held a group feedback session
after we had exported our final cut and received a large
amount of really positive feedback from the group who all
seemed to really enjoy it. Interestingly, the ‚Teddy
Bear’s Picnic‛ music produced controversy as some found
it incredibly chilling and others found it funny (but
people do laugh when they are nervous).

8. Results From Audience Research
Question 1: Would you continue watching?
General consensus = Yes
Question 2: What was the storyline?
Memory Loss, Amnesia
Question 3: Did you find it scary?
The music on the TV (teddy bear song)and reacted to the reveal
of 5 on hand (peal back of bandage)
Question 4: Would you watch a foreign- subtitled film now?
Yes
Question 5: What do you think happens next?
He gets controlled by the masked person
Question 6: Remind you of any other films?
Saw
Question 7: What was the title?
Overseer

9. Did your final audience testing
demonstrate that you were
successful in appealing to your
target audience?
Our group: 17-18 Year-Old Teenage Boys
Overall, Yes
; The audience associated Saw with our film which shows that the mask
was iconic of horror; they identified part of the iconography.
The audience also knew what the title was which was a previous concern
of our teacher.
They understood the plot to an extent by correctly predicting the
following scenes of the film and having a general idea about the
memory loss of Alex.

10. Group
Post By
Georgia,
Alex &
Isaac