Media Studies AS evaluation

1. WHO WOULD BE THE AUDIENCE
FOR YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT?
HOW DID YOU ADDRESS/ATTRACT
YOUR AUDIENCE?
Evaluation Josie Askem

2. CASTING
The teenage female in our production is the main protagonist, we chose
to cast her so that the film would appeal to a younger audience. The
main audience of psychological thrillers tends to be women, and
therefore casting a woman for the leading role, will attract them.
We also did it because we wanted to go against the convention of having
a male lead role.
Mulvey’s theory suggests that the media is controlled by men (The Male
Gaze), and that women are presented as men see them – we wanted to
go against this whole theory and therefore tried to make the female role
come across as a pluralistic view of a teenager.
The male role is played by an older man, however we did plan to cast a
teenage boy so that it would attract a younger audience. We changed this,
and cast an middle-aged man to bring in an older audience too, as well as
it creating a more questioning scene.

3. TARGET AUDIENCE
I found that most of the people that enjoy watching films are older
people, 60% of those being female. With this in mind, we decided that
our audience would be late teens to middle-aged people to attract as
many people as possible. By it being made with this age group in mind,
attracting them will mean we would make a larger profit from our film.
This is furthered by being able to advertise via social media sites, (which
our target audience tend to be on very often), which is free and
therefore would increase our profit.

4. CODES AND CONVENTIONS
Our film includes a lot of common codes and conventions of
psychological thrillers to bring it to the attention of people who
regularly watch this type of film, as well as our target audience.
An example of this would be, Barthes’ theory of hermeneutic codes
(making the audience question things happening) which we used by
having the characters play Russian Roulette with no explanation.
We also included white text on a black background for our credits, which
is another convention.
To make our piece more original, we challenged a few conventions such
as choosing to include an actual weapon (a gun in our case), where most
psychological thrillers leave the real weapon to be the killers mind.

5. USES AND GRATIFICATION
THEORY
Originally, the uses and gratification theory arose in the 1940s but has
been changed about as times change (in the 70s and 80s). This theory is
about how and why people actively seek out specific media and is
positivistic in it’s approach. It assumes that audience members are not
passive consumers of media, but actually have an active role in
interpreting and integrating media into their own lives.
For example for our opening, people who regularly watch psychological
thrillers would seek out our film as it is the genre that they are familiar
with.

6. MISE EN SCENE
Looking at statistics, the gun (which is our main prop) would appeal
more to men than women. The research shows men react better to
action and violence in films and TV, than women do. This suggests our
use of the gun should keep male readers engaged.
The teenage female is dressed in a hoodie, which we hope will also help
appeal to a younger audience, as they could relate to her costume.
The older man is dressed in a suit, which is more mature and should
help us attract an older/more mature audience – this would mean our
viewership is fairly large.