Evaluation question 4

As seen at the start of our movie, the film is rated 15 by the British Board of Film Classification. This is because our thriller consists of explicit scenes of language, drug abuse and violence, along with scenes of long suspense and peril unsuitable for minors. It is however not quite in the realms of an 18 certificate, making it accessible to many more movie-goers. Both males and females were targeted at for our film and rather than us centralizing at one specific gender we made the film with the thought in mind that both sexes should be able to enjoy it. The two main characters end up being representative of that as they are both male and female.

Before creating our film we had to find out a bit about our audience and their desires, so we created this short video for research.

After, we had to see what our audience wanted from it on a wider, less biased scale. So we created a short 5 minute questionnaire and handed it out to 40 random people. From this we gathered important information on our core audience and found what makes them satisfied when watching a film.

For the full list of results click here.

How do you feel about violence and strong language being shown in a movie?

We found that a large majority of our audience did in fact want there to be violence and hard language in the film, ruling out the possibility of it being a U, PG or perhaps even 12A certificate and instead orientating to a older market.  

What types of thrillers do you enjoy?

The questionnaire revealed that our audience overwhelmingly proffered psychological thrillers rather than anything others. We targeted our film at this audience as the plot dwells significantly on psychological details such as the warping of ones perspective.

What genre of movie was your favourite?

We also found that people enjoyed horror and comedy films the most. By realizing this it allowed us to think about incorporating elements of both these genres into our film and led to the creation of David as a character. 

The research allowed us to form a rather clear idea of our main target audience - young adults, both male and female looking for a film that they can relax and enjoy easily but one that remains intelligent and engaging. To match the results of our research our film would have to be a psychological thriller with elements of horror and comedy, with an emphasis on the plot and one that does not hold back on violence and offensive language when required not to. 

It is important to remember, however, that just because this is our primary audience it does not mean it is the only audience. Whilst our results displayed what the majority want from our film there are still a lot of people who want other things too, so whilst focusing primarily on the most wanted factors we did not exclude thinking about other factors too.