Evaluation - Question 4

• Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience for our piece would be middle class ranging from teenagers to mature adults. I feel we have made our piece appealing to a large target audience as we have a teenager and an adult featured so people from all ages can relate to both. As our piece falls into the sub-genre of psychological thriller we feel older people would have more relation because they can understand the content better. I feel this piece would be unsuitable for anyone under the age of 15 as some of the contents can be quite extreme and scary.

In order to gain market research we created a questionnaire and handed it out to our class mates and further pupils through out the sixth form, we already knew this age group was suitable as our target audience and thought this was the best way to gain many quick answers, our questionnaire consisted of questions asking what our audience wanted from our piece, enabling us to gain an insight into what's popular at the moment and how we can achieve the best opening scene possible.

Question one - "what is your favourite sub-genre?" resulted in 'action' being the most popular answer, followed by 'mystery' being second most popular. This meant these were the two sub-genres our target audience wanted to see so we decided to base our piece on mystery and action. We created mystery by using very close up shots so the audience are not given a full picture of what is happening thus always guessing. We then created action by having tense running scenes allowing the audience to feel the intensity and fear thus emphasising the thrill of our piece.

Question two - "what do you like to see in a thriller opening?" resulted in 'quick snappy shots' as the most popular answer, I feel we have definitely achieved this as we have many shots of different lengths, some only a couple of seconds long. This proved to be a really effective way of building tension and creating a thrilling atmosphere.

Question three - "where do you prefer the opening scenes to be shot?" this question resulted with 'woods' being the most popular answer, we felt shooting the entire opening in the woods wouldn't be as effective and interesting as taking shots in various locations. Our final three shots (of the chase and the female character running away) were shot in a woods area, giving a secluded, mysterious feel to our piece.

Question four - "how often do you watch thriller films?" I feel this question had little revelvance to how we needed to create and edit our piece succesfully but we found the most popular answer was 'monthly' which would suggest thriller is quite a popular genre of film for average households to watch, as in the average household very little films are watched monthly, meaning if one of which is a thriller they are a successful genre to invest in.

Question five - "what is your favourite thriller?" this question had a highly large range of answers and no particular film stood out, although we found 'Psycho', a classic horror/thriller had the most mentions.

Overall I feel the span of our target market is open to a large number as they aren't typically aimed at a specific market, only usually over a certain age. This means the audience for our piece can be either male or female, of any background and over the age of 15.