Who are your audience and what have you learned from their feedback?

1. Who are your audience and what
have you learned from your
audience feedback?
Francesca Roncoli

2. Intended outcome of production
• The intended outcome of our production was to produce a horror trailer
to attract our target audience 15-25. I believe we were successful in doing
so and this success is evident through our audience feedback. The genre
was denoted through many techniques, from characters and lighting to
mixed pace editing. I believe creating a twitter page for our film massively
helped in the promotion of our film as teenagers (our audience) flock to
social media websites and therefore it is a convenient and low cost
method of advertisement.

3. Who are our audience?
• When researching into target audiences, we found, through
our questionnaire, that those who wanted a horror genre
with a female antagonist were both males and females ages
15-25. Bearing this in mind we decided to go ahead with the
horror genre. I believe that targeting an audience of our age
was extremely useful for our production as we could relate to
them, we know what attracts them, and therefore they can
relate to our production.

4. Genre and Audience appeal
• The genre triangle proposes the idea that
audience, institution and texts are all reliant on
each other. The genre attracts the audience which
in return produces money for the production
company which is then used to make more films
specific to that genre. Bearing that in mind it is
imperative to identify your genre as you can then
market it in a certain way which attracts the
audience. For example those interested in the
horror genre may expect to see horror
conventions e.g. blood and the supernatural. The
most revealing question on our questionnaire is
the one in which identified the audiences favourite
genre. We all agreed that we should then go
ahead with this genre as we had an interest in it
therefore we are more motivated and creative
with our ideas and we since we were the same age
as our target audience could produce a trailer in a
way that we ourselves would like and therefore
our audience.

5. Uses and Gratification Theory- Blumler
and Katz
The uses and gratification theory proposes the idea that audiences have
certain needs that media seeks to gratify:
 Diversion
 Personal relationships and social interaction
 Personal identity
 Surveillance
This theory focuses on the audience and the idea that people use media
rather than media effecting people. Unlike hypodermic needle theory
which states audiences are passive uses and gratification theory suggests
audiences take an active role in interpreting and then conducting media
into their lives. The theory also suggests that audiences select media to
meet their needs/gratify them.

6. Diversion and Personal Relationships
• Diversion refers to the audiences needs to escape from their
everyday life and so use the media to gratify these needs, and
everyday example of this is coming home from work and watching
TV as a way of relaxing. Our piece of media is a diversion for
audiences as it is so dissimilar to everyday life and therefore can be
used as a method of escaping.
• Personal Relationships refer to the idea that people use media to
gratify their need for companionship and to form relationships. An
everyday example of this is going to the cinema to watch a film with
a friend and therefore building and forming relationships.

7. Personal Identity and Surveillance
• The personal identity aspect of the theory relates to
audiences using media to find out about themselves certain
audiences relate to certain pieces of media and in a way,
reflect that audience.
• Surveillance refers to using media to monitor what’s going on
in the world. The news acts as a way or monitoring life as
does reality TV programs such as Big Brother

8. Hypodermic Needle Theory
• The theory states that media products can influence a mass
audience by ‘injecting’ them with certain messages through
media to gain a desired response. This theory works on the
assumption that audiences are passive and therefore unable
to resist the impact of media and its message. The passive
audience have messages injected into their mind which
ultimately leads to an influence over their actions.
• Children are particularly passive in relation to media and thus
we have rated our film 15 (that contains threats of horror) in
order to prevent the plot from affecting audiences.

9. The Case of James Bulger
• When under trial for the murder of James Bulger the judge
suggested 'exposure to violent videos' may have influenced
the boys' behaviour. This could be linked to hypodermic
needle theory as it was said Thompson and Venables watched
Child’s play 3 which features films of graphic violence.

10. Genre Representations
• In many ways we adhered to the
conventions of horror, the
chiaroscuro lighting, the eerie
soundtrack etc. However we
challenged certain conventions with
our antagonist Evelyn, usually
women are seen to be the more
submissive and weaker sex, however
in our trailer Evelyn is dominant and
menacing although not a typical
convention a female antagonist is
prevalent in a lot of horrors, for
example the grudge.

11. Audience Feedback
• We conducted a focus group to gain some insight into the success of our
trailer. We asked certain questions to see if we fulfilled the purpose of our
trailer ‘to make an entertaining trailer with clear conventions that attracts
audiences’. Asking them questions such as ‘what genre is this?’ and
‘would you see this film?’ let us know if we met our target. We received
really positive feedback from the focus group with 100% identifying the
correct genre and the majority saying they would see the film. The
minority who wouldn’t didn’t like horror as a genre. This was extremely
pleasing for our group and from this feedback I’d say we targeted the
correct audience as we knew what they liked and therefore they related
to our production.
Focus group

12. Skills Development and Audience
• I believe my skills have developed massively from AS to A2, I have learned
not only about conventions and genres but how to use them in an
effective and creative way. Looking at genre, in my AS coursework
although the genre was evident it didn’t carry many of the conventions
that make it interesting. I believe at A2 I have developed a further
understanding as to what makes films/genres appealing. I believe by
studying theorist such as Rick Altman who suggests genre is defined by it
semantic elements ( eg knives, blood, eerie music) which are instantly
recognisable for audiences and syntactic elements which refers to the
themes in a film eg revenge I have gained a wider knowledge as to how
these elements work and incorporated them into our film. Whereas at AS
level I hadn’t looked in depth at what makes a genre a genre. In terms of
genre and it’s conventions I believe my progression is evident, as within
my A2 we’ve used both semantic and syntactic elements and thoroughly
explored them, whereas at AS they were more bland and didn’t really
connote any themes. I believe developing my knowledge of genre
contributed to the production and ultimately helped towards getting the
feedback we did and thus enticing an audience.

13. Skills Development
• I believe I developed in terms of mise en scene due to
the fact last years production was filmed in broad
daylight, in a nice neighbourhood and didn’t particularly
conform to the conventions of a thriller. Also last year I
believe we didn’t particularly vary the setting in the sense
that it was all done in one location in different places but
other than that there was no real variation. However this
year we ensured we were filming in lots of different
settings with the appropriate mise en scene. One scene
I’m particularly pleased with is the one with Evelyn
cackling on the chair as she rocks back and fourth, for
this scene we had to wait for darkness and use portable
flash light to create the effect we did. I believe this shows
a true development in terms of planning and creativity.

14. Was our trailer successful?
• I believe our trailer was succesful in meeting its intended
purpose. I hoped this year the genre would be clearly
denoted and the production would be to a very high
standard. I think we achieved this and we can see we did so
through our audience feedback. Genre and audiences are
closely linked according to Ryall’s genre triangle which we
incorporated into our production. Overall I am extremely
pleased with our trailer which this year was thoroughly
planned out and was a lot more in depth with our syntactic
elements being a lot more prevalent than they were last year
(the theme of fear was denoted throughout our production
when last year it was lacking these themes)