Media evaluation - Who would be the audience for your media product? (question 4)

Our target audience is a person, male or female, who enjoys psychological thrillers. This genre tends to deal with complex and often disturbing issues, so a healthy dose of irreverence and enjoyment in watching and discussing complicated issues is welcomed. Our target audience is a person who is a free and open thinker and their lifestyle probably reflects that, they are probably outspoken on social issues and critical of injustice, especially considering our film contains a hidden pandemic, homelessness. We formulated questionnaires to hand out to our friends and then conducted audience profiles on those who indicated that they liked our chosen genre of film, psychological thriller, the most. I then asked some questions to two of my friends who said that their favourite genre of film was psychological thriller. In the discussion that ensued they told me that their favourite things about psychological thrillers which were: when a film is ambiguous, has a twist for example in ‘The Departed’ and ‘Shutter Island’, guessing ‘who?/why?/what?’, and watching something challenging.

That conversation largely influenced satisfying some characters and the plot, for example we have a lesbian love affair and love triangle in a religious environment. In regards to the ambiguous feature we decided we would try and incorporate it as we all enjoy it in the films we watch, for example: the end scene of the silence of the lambs where Hannibal says “i’m having an old friend for dinner as he follows the head guard who tormented him when he was in prison. The ambiguous element in our film is that it is left to the audiences imagination to decide whether or not Sister Judith has killed her child or not when they walk into the river in the final scene.

A sample of the results from our questionnaire, the three most common responses were 'interesting' 'complex' and 'tense'