Q4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

     It is important to consider your audience when making a film to know how to tailor it to make it more appealing to the intended audience. It is also very valuable when making decisions on how to successfully market and distribute the film to reach as much of the target audience as possible, therefore increasing profits.

Diagram 1 (Se7en)

     To gain a greater understanding of our target audience, I have looked at statistics from IMDb. The majority of thriller films have predominately male audiences. This is true for the popular thriller film 'Se7en', which was influential when making my film because it is such a popular thriller film (which is supported by the consistently high ratings in the statistics) which effectively utilized many conventions of the genre (for more on this, see my post http://sarahhalevelmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/how-are-conventions-of-film-noir-used.html ). As diagram 1 shows, 720500 of the people who reviewed the film on IMDb were male, compared to 145341 females; this means that it can be estimated that more than 80% of the film's audience were male.

Diagram 2 (The Disappearance of Alice Creed)

     'The Disappearance of Alice Creed' is another thriller film that was very influential for us. It is even more similar to our film than 'Se7en' because of the similarities of the plots of our films (both films are about kidnappings) and because they are both low-budget indie films. Calculations using the statistics from diagram 2 show that 86% of the people who rated 'The Disappearance of Alice Creed' on IMDb were males, so it is likely that the vast majority of the audience were male. Most of the audience for the film were non-US users of IMDb; because it is a low-budget British film it is likely that its audience were mostly domestic and I would expect the same for our film.

Diagram 3 (The Lovely Bones)

     'The Lovely Bones' also had some influence on our film. Although the primary genre which it is categorised into is 'drama' rather than 'thriller', it does contain many elements of the thriller genre which make it relevant to my product. Moreover, there are strong similarities in plot and character of 'The Lovely Bones' and my film ('Coercion'); both films involve the kidnapping of a teenage girl by an obsessive neighbour. Diagram 3 shows that themajority of people who rated the film on IMDb were male, like the other films which I investigated. However, there is a smaller difference between the number of male and female viewers - nearly one third of ratings in the diagram are from female audience members. This may be partly due to the female protagonist; our film also stars a female lead, so we may also expect a significant number of female viewers within our mostly male audience. The statistics for this film present a younger audience that the other diagrams; the largest age group who rated 'The Lovely Bones' were aged 18-29 and our film could attract a similar audience of young adults because the protagonist of 'Coercion' is quite young but the film's themes are too dark for a very young audience.

     This is Matt, an example member of the target audience for 'Coercion'. He is a 22 year old student who lives in a medium-sized city in England (like the setting of our film), who enjoys watching films in his spare time. He is particularly enthusiastic about thriller films because he likes to immerse himself into the tense and suspenseful stories, especially in the sub-genre of psychological thriller films (which our film could be included in due to the obsessive and psychopathic traits of our antagonist). As well as watching films, he enjoys playing video games and loves their exciting action sequences. Although he enjoys some popular music, he likes discovering less well-known indie bands because of the individuality and greater variety that can be found, plus he enjoys sharing these discoveries with his friends - he likes indie films for similar reasons.