My media evaluation

1. Who would be the audience for
your media product, and how did
you attract/address your audience?

2. OUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Why do people watch horror films?
• Horror films have an added element of entertainment and
excitement. Audiences chose to watch these films mainly because
they have the thrill factor, compared to other genres such as
comedy which are designed to be humorous or thriller which are
designed to be action pact and interesting.
Horror
• The film genre which I will be studying the target audience for is
Horror films. Knowing your genre and your target audience helps
the film makers know what content to include and what not to
include. The aim for all films is make decent revenue from the film,
and by knowing your target audience will help you out.

3. • Our target audience should have no required background. Students
or unskilled workers with little educational background should still
be able to grasp the concept of our opening sequence and fully
aware of the content involved. The class which I think would go and
watch an horror are a middle/working class. This is because
teenagers are more likely relate to our film because our film fit in
with the characters shown in our film.
• I think for our movie it could be any race as there is no specific race
to watch our type of film. However when producing our film we can
also target our audience by the use of a range of different
ethnicities in the cast. The race of the characters in the film can be
seen as being very important, if the audience are the same race as
members of the cast the audience will then feel that they are able
to relate to the character. The use of different ethnicities therefore
helps to widen the target audiences.

4. • It would obvioulsy be aimed more at those interested in horror films, but also those who likes a film
with a mystery, where you are not aware of what is going on completely all the time. We would like
to make our film have a social aspect to it, where people within their social groups can still talk and
discuss it.
• Our opening sequence shall be directed to both male and females. When researching we
found films that are aimed at both genders deemed to be more popular than most.
• The age range for our target audience will be around 15+ as we feel teenagers would mainly take an
interest more in the content than maybe someone of the older generation. We also chose this age
category for target market as my research from existing institutions showed that 15-24 year old’s
attended the cinema more than other age categories, this is shown in official statistics.We also
discovered the common age of someone watching a horror film is around the age of 15 to 25.
Watching a horror movie gives a thrill and can excite a younger aimed target audience more than
any other. The younger age range is also susceptible to being put off the film by violence or
unnatural images which makes the audience have a negative reaction.
• We will also be considering audience theory/s when creating our horror opening sequence.

5. GENDER
Deciding who our audience was aimed at was a
large part of our research. Depending on what our
target audience we wanted to attract, finalised
what content we did and didn’t include.
It helped that horror is a popular genre choice for
both males and females therefore we decided to
target both genders for our audience rather than
being more direct for example chick flicks targeted
more of a female based audience and action
mystery films targeting more of a male based
viewers.

6. AGE RATING
• We came up with our age rating once our
production was made. We came to this
decision of this by looking at other films and
their content in comparison to their age rating
and also the BBFC. The BBFC was really useful
as we were able to compare our opening
sequence to what they classed as a 15 rating
and we then found it was a match for ours.

7. AGE RATING
• We gave the rating of our film as a age 15 rating which
means that the audience could be from any age of 15 and
above, we decided to give the restriction to young younger
than 15 not being able to watch the film because it isn’t
suitable for them therefore we need to take into
consideration that they may take idea from the film
because young people pick things up easily, copy and use
them in everyday life which could be deadly. By choosing a
15 rating this meant that we didn’t include any offensive
language, behaviour and the horror can be strong without
being sexualised to something more, the reason we chose
to use a 15 rating is because we felt that it gives us the
chance to appeal to younger audience compared to other
horror films such as ‘Scream’ which are rated at 18+

8. AGE RATING
• Our opening sequence has been made so that it would
appeal to both genders creating a wider audience to
view the media product, due to the fact that my media
product is a 15 it means that it’s the type of media
product which would appeal to someone of my age
range but also has been made so that someone age
30+ would be able to enjoy viewing the product too.
Younger consumers of films usually are only included in
part time employment therefore they are able to visit
the cinema occasionally when there are films which
really appeal and intrigue them, there is always an
advantage and disadvantage to everything.

9. AGE RATING
• As our film is a horror and not many have
been made to appeal to a younger audience
to make an impact because we wanted it to
make a difference to the films which have
already been made in a similar way.

10. How we attracted our audience?

11. Introduction
• We attracted and addressed our audience by
using our characters to our advantage and
also the help of three theorists, Richard Dyer,
Abraham Masion and Blumier + Katz. We
came across these constantly being used by
productions to make their films unique and
enhancing them to seem more appealing to
target audiences.

12. RICHARD DYER
• Firstly, Richard Dyer claimed that the people go looking
for things in films that they may lack in life. For
example, safety and security is a common one.
• People don’t tend to experience ‘horror’ as such, in an
everyday environment and may seek a thrill out of it in
horror films, without any physical harm caused to
them.
• We applied this to our production by creating a sense
of fear and tension built up within the opening
sequence to create what our target audience would be
expecting.

13. BLUMIER AND KATZ
• Secondly, Blumier and Katz came up with the uses and gratifications theory. This theory
indicated that people want certain pleasures out of the films they watch, such as
· The need to be INFORMED and EDUCATED about the world in which they live
· The need to IDENTIFY personally with the characters and situations in order to learn more
about themselves
· The need to be ENTERTAINED by a range and variety of well constructed texts
· The need to use the media as a talking point for SOCIAL INTERACTION
· The need to ESCAPE from their ‘daily grind’ into other worlds and situations
We included most, but not all. We did this by mainly our use of characters.

14. CHARACTERS
• It was important that we attracted our audience and
most of all we did this through our characters. Taking
into consideration the rating of our film we made the
film appealing by using young characters in order for
the audience to relate to them, not in the way which
unusual things happen but how the characters behaved
and how it affected them. By using young male
characters, who then became the victims, showed
them in a vunerable position allowing the audience to
sympathies with them.
• We allowed them to be stereotypically understood

15. ABRAHAM MASLOW
Maslow explores human needs, just as Dyer does, but
it starts off as a physical needs and works its way up
to psychological. For example we physically want to
feel safe, but then we also need to psychologically.
We did this by playing with people psychological
needs by making them feel scared and anxious.

16. FILMING
• In order to attract our audience we needed to
make it look visually appealing to them. The
way we did this was through the use of
camera shots and angles.
• We used quite a few close up shots to allow
the audience to be apart of the action, this
form of subjective filming is proven to engage
an audience as they feel part of the action in
the narrative

17. Filming Cont
• The inclusion of two narrative strands appeals
to the audience as they are mentally engaged
in the text- the enigmatic title shots prove to
challenge the audience and not give them too
detailed clues early on. From our research we
found out that this was a technique which our
target audience enjoyed in horror films.

18. EDITING
• We engaged our audience by starting off as a
slow pace, we then gradually speeding up the
action to control the attention of our
audience.