While the document's authors aimed to create a media product for a sophisticated audience, their audience feedback revealed this audience may have been overestimated. One member questioned costume inaccuracies, showing active engagement, but neither mentioned representations of the female protagonist. This could mean the audience was unable to fully notice representations due to stereotypical elements. Overall, the authors chose the right older, higher-income audience but could have better understood their preferences through more research and larger audience testing.

2. What did I/we expect?
0 As we have aimed our media product, in
terms of our primary audience, at more
sophisticated audiences (i.e. those in
the A/B income bracket who are mainly
thinkers and innovators), we expect
that our audience would mainly be
active. This would mean that these
audience members would have the
capability to question the ideologies
and (stereotypical) representations that
we have conveyed in our opening
sequence.

3. Were the audience members form our
audience feedback active viewers
though?
0 I feel that our audience feedback members were fairly active, but not
as active as perhaps expected. This may have been because I asked
questions that didn’t delve deeper into their opinions of the
representations shown.
0 However, Glenn (the male audience feedback member) touched on
the fact that he thought that the costumes for the actors were not
quite accurate, as he said that they possibly should have worn “shell
suits, track-suit bottoms, trainers”, due to having experience in retail,
and having people (some from the working class) thieving at the
shop he works at. This could be an example of how our sophisticated
audience members may take the stereotypes (of the protagonist) as
read as opposed to challenging them.

4. How does this show that our
audience feedback members were
active?
0 Glenn’s comment about mise-en-scene elements i.e. the
inaccuracy of costume (and props(?)) could also indicate he has
almost compared our representations with his experiences and
opinion, rather than reading the representation. Therefore,
disagreeing with out representations (as he then realises that
our representations are not a reflection on reality) gives
evidence that he in particular, has actively questioned and
challenged the representations, making him more of a
sophisticated viewer and therefore an active viewer.

5. However…
0 Neither of our audience feedback
members mentioned any ideas or
opinions on the representations of Rosie,
such as the representation of an
empowered female for example and
whether her gender had any influence on
their interpretation of our product.
0 This may have happened maybe because
I didn’t ask specific enough questions or
perhaps these audience members were
not able to ‘notice’ these representations.

6. Why would this be?
0 This may have been because sometimes, we fell in the trap of being
too stereotypical for a sophisticated audience, and therefore they
were unable to fully pick up on the representations, such as the
empowered female.
0 In order to have improved on this, we could have perhaps been less
stereotypical and even swap our primary and secondary audiences,
so that our sophisticated viewers were our secondary audience.
This may be beneficial, as our current secondary audience (those in
the E income bracket) would be able to relate to the character more
easily as a result of personal identity (according to Blumer and
Katz’s uses and gratifications.)

7. Continued...
0 Evidence to suggest that this might have been a better
audience set-up, as our audience feedback members reflect
and talk more about formal aspects as opposed to aspects of
the narrative, as they perhaps were unable to relate to the
narrative content. Particularly, as Glenn especially didn’t
relate to the engagement between characters over the money.

8. So… did we chose the right
audience in the end??
0 In the end, as a result of our audience feedback, we were right in
choosing an older A/B income bracket audience, as they seemed to
have enjoyed the intellectual audience of pleasure of genre, and also
enjoyed the information that our media product conveyed about
social issues.
0 On the other hand, it could be argued that we over-estimated our
sophisticated audience, in the sense that they were slightly confused
by the sophisticated structure or our opening sequence narrative,
especially as Julie (the female audience feedback member) wanted
clarification at the end of the opening sequence with diegetic
dialogue from the policeman.

9. So... Did we choose the right
audience in the end?? (con...)
0 Originally, there was some swearing in the dialogue that we then
removed from our opening sequence and, according to the Media
institutional regulations of ‘bbfc’, the inclusion of anti- social
behaviour such as theft all requires us to rate our film a 15.
Therefore I think that we chose the appropriate film certification
as although there was no swearing in the opening sequence, this
would not mean that there would be swearing in the rest of the
film. In addition having our certification at 15 still allows all of our
audience members, both primary and secondary to watch the film
as they are all over 15 years of age.

10. Continued...
0 However, the audience feedback only consisted of 2 members and
therefore maybe this verdict would be more reliable/ accurate if we
had more people watch, and express their opinions on our opening
sequence. This could have been improved by possibly doing an
online survey via the use of web 2.0, whereby our target audience
via Facebook/ Twitter are able to answer the same questions as
those asked in the audience feedback. This would enable us to fully
gage and evaluate whether these target audiences were the correct
choices.

12. Simple...slight lack in
understanding?!
0 Although I think that we made the right decision for audience, I
feel that we could have understood and/or catered our product
to them better. For example, for our pilot questionnaire, our
candidates were divided by minimal or 'constant' dialogue.
This may have been because our active audience members
may/ may not want everything to be explicitly told to them, as
they are sophisticated enough to realise the nature of our
opening sequence narrative through visual elements, such as
mise-en-scene.

13. Continued...
0 I think that our original plan of using dialogue went wrong (as
there was virtually no dialogue in our final production) not
only because we had issues with sound recordings and that
removing the dialogue actually improved the continuity of our
opening sequence, but also because of a mix between trying to
be too sophisticated, attempting to tell our narrative through
dialogue rather than action and also not being subtle enough
when conveying our challenging ideologies.

14. Continued...
0 In addition, our questionnaires also reported that
candidates wanted fairly equal amounts of low and high-
key lighting. We wanted to focus on low- key lighting. Again,
this may have been the case because our main audience is
sophisticated and therefore they would realise that
representations of the working class don't necessarily have
to be grounded in misery connoted by dark shadows, as this
is very (perhaps too) stereotypical.

15. Continued...
0 Although these issues were altered to adhere more with
what our target audience wanted, I think we should have
initially researched independent social realism media
products tailored to more sophisticated viewers more, so
that our questions were more specific and more helpful in
terms of what our target audiences wanted out of our
media product.