AUDIENCE EVALUATION

HOW DID WE ATTRACT OR ADRESS OUR AUDIENCE?

Before making the project, we first needed to know the preferences and taste of the audience, and what would scare

them, a key component in making a horror sequence, to achieve this my group conducted research into the target audience of 16-35 year olds, with the feedback from the

audience preference data, we could then incorporate this into our horror sequence to appease the audience most

effectively.

This data is from an anonymous survey on survey monkey, we used this as a medium to conduct our research into the mind-set of our audience. My group member Grace https://gwainner.wordpress.com/ converted the data from the survey monkey into pie charts. This chart shows that our sample sympathise with female characters more, this could be largely due to many films portraying females as the “damsel in destress” conforming to Propp’s narrative theory. Because of this we made a lead character/victim a female, but because many felt sympathetic to males we also incorporated a meal lead as well, the use of two main characters increases representation and allows our piece to be as progressive and appealing as possible. We used our data to influence our decisions surrounding our film to hopefully achieve the largest audience, and one that would enjoy the film as much as possible.

We asked this question to see if sexuality mattered to our sample size, whether the sexuality of the lead(s) mattered to whether they would watch the piece or not, the majority stated ‘no’ however a minority did state that the sexuality of characters mattered, so to appease them we used two leads of different genders to appeal to the largest possible audience

We asked this question to see if people cared about the ethnicity of a characters, our sample unanimously declared that ethnicity did not matter to them, we took this result and decided that we would not chose a character based on their ethnicity, this allowed us to be free in our choosing and not be constrained by ethnicity, which undoubtedly should not matter regardless.

This survey result allowed us to pursue a clear direction when formulating the plot for our piece, the results showed us that we needed to make a detailed, multi-tiered plot, not a simple cliché plot of a doll murdering victims, but one with emotion and doubt, that made the characters but also the audience question decisions and motives, not just unanimously picture the doll as the main and only antagonist.

Who would be the main target audience for your media piece?

For our target audience we chose a 15-35 age range, this is because it incorporates the largest horror viewer age group of 15-25 year olds, but the fact that the doll is old and outdated this could appeal to slightly older viewers of whom might’ve had similar toys when they were growing up, and also they might prefer the psychological horror theme to more violent and harsh horror sub-genres such as slasher and zombies. We felt the 15-35 age range was appropriate, and as most horrors are 15 or 18 rated we felt that our target audience would be more mature and would be able to understand the narrative. After research into the horror genre and the British Board of Film Classification we came to the decision that our film would be rated a 15, this was due to us making it legal for our lowest quartile of our target audience to watch the film, but also to appeal to the more horror-weary audiences, of whom might think an 18 rated film would be too graphic. We chose to use the gothic sub-genre of horror as a basis to the creation of our piece, as we used a doll, this was due to the great scenery, atmosphere and cinematography that gothic horrors usually depict, which we wanted to replicate in our own piece. We also chose to make our horror a psychological horror, as films of this nature have a large target audience such as paranormal activity, and demand would be high, but also the group preference was shifted away from slasher and zombie horrors of which we thought the current market is over-saturated.

We continued to ask questions to individuals about their perceptions on horror, to try and obtain an appropriate target audience age range.

This question allowed us to determine that the majority of our sample size were easy to scare, which meant that we could be more direct in our techniques to connote horror, making it easier to scare a larger audience, however the question is inefficient as it does not determine who doesn’t get scared, the wording ensures that ensures that everyone gets scared, but some more than others, without the clear definition it made the data difficult to truly incorporate into our media text, and to allow us to determine our target audience sufficiently.

The data from the question shows the genre preference of our sample, paranormal and gothic horror sub-genres are the most popular, we used this as evidence to dictate our choice in genre, as a result “Porcelain” incorporates both the paranormal and gothic sub genres to try and achieve the largest audience possible. And although many people might not like these sub-genres, our strict conformation with the conventions of horror, would mean that many will still enjoy our film as they will see certain aspects of other sub-genres in our text aswell.