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1. Discuss the importance of the
audience to media products and
media industries in general.

2. Why does the film industry spend so much time and money
test screening films to invited audiences or finding out what
audiences like through market research?
The film industry spends a lot of time and money on test screenings
to invited audiences and market research as they need to find out
what their target audience is for their film and how they react to
them. They need to know what the audience like about the film and
whether it will be successful in the cinema. Also, they want to know
what appeals to them as they can include as much of this as they
can in the filmt to appeal a mass target audience. For example, if
their target audience is 15-25 year olds and through market
research they find out that social media is the main way they find
out about new films they may decide to focus on increasing the
amount of advertising they put on social media. Another reason for
the film industry to use market research is so they know where
there movie will fit in the market. They could release it in cinema,
box office, straight to DVD or online sites such as NetFlix.

3. Our target audience for our film is 15-25 year olds and contains
both male and females, with females slightly topping the males.
This is due to the doll feature of the film – this may not appeals
to males as much as they might not feel this is a scary feature.
To find out the target audience for similar films to ours we used
Pearl and Deans website. We looked at the film Annabelle as it
is a horror film which also uses a doll as its unique selling point.
We found out that the main audience was 15-24 year olds and the
next popular age range was 26-34 year olds so a fairly young
audience.
Who are your audience?
After this we used
a questionnaire to
ask our target
audience what
they liked/disliked
about horror films.

4. At what stages did you ask your audience
questions or get their feedback?
We asked for feedback at three stages. We did three screenings and
got feedback from our target audience after each of these. At
the first screening we had just put the clips together and added a
few titles so the feedback was just to see whether they liked the
initial clips we had chosen. On our second screening we gained
more detailed feedback. At this stage we had added sound,
filters, more titles and transitions.
We gained feedback on what worked
well any improvements. One
improvement we made was to make it
clear who maddies character was. This
lead to us doing some re filming. We did
a final screening in which we presented
all 3 of our products to our target
audience to get their opinion.
This is a screenshot of
our first rough cut which
we showed to our target
audience.

5. We used a questionnaire to get
feedback we thought this worked
well as it could cover a lot of
subjects for example mise en
scene, camerawork, sound and
editing. It was also easy to analyse
and we could gather a lot of
feedback in a short amount of
time. We distributed these
questionnaires to males and
females in our target audience age
range after they had watched our
teaser trailer. On the second and
third screening we included the
poster and magazine in our
feedback.

6. How did you use this feedback? Was it useful? Did
you make any changes to your work because of it?
• The audience feedback we achieved from the first viewing of our rough
cut of 'Adeline‘ was fairly positive, they said that it clearly conveyed the
horror/thriller genre through the use of the doll and the eerie tone. The
main strengths identified were our use of sound; especially the baby
crying that was identified as being very realistic. The use of costume and
make up made the trailer look authentic and added to the horror
conventions. The improvements we were told we could make were too
add more titles and to add some more shots; both of these were said to
make it clearer who the doll was and how she got in the house as at the
moment it was a little unclear. From this feedback we added more titles
and did some re-filming to gain more appropriate shots which set the
scene better. This was helpful as after we had added the new shots we
felt it looked a lot better than the original.
• When we were constantly looking at the film we couldn’t see where we
needed improvements but a new pair of eyes meant they could pick out
things that we hadn't and as they were our target audience it meant that
we could change our film to appeal to them more.