EVALUATION ACTIVITY 4 - Holly

Who would be the audience for your media product?

From our research we discovered that the best age certificate for our thriller would be a 15.

If a film has the age certificate of a 15, it means that no one under 15 is allowed to see it at the cinema or rent it, as they are works that are not suitable for children under this age.

In a 15 rated films you are likely to expect like strong violence, strong language, drug taking and sexual nudity/sexual activity.

Examples of 15 rated thriller films include Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006), and Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Our opening does not contain these aspects in an explicit manner however it is implied and therefore it can be assumed that there may be scenes of this nature later on in the film.

We decided that a 15 would be the most suitable as the next rating down, a 12a, would be much too low. This is because the use of strong language must be infrequent, anything about sex must only be suggested and the same goes with strong violence, any misuse of drugs must infrequent. We collectively thought that this would not adhere to what the film had to offer. We didn’t want to make the rating an 18 as we don’t especially have that much violence, sexual nudity or the presence of drugs so it would definitely be unnecessary to have the age rating so high. Also, we though that if we made the rating an 18, our target audience of 15-21 would be very limited and would reduce our chances of success.

From my audience research I found that there was a bigger proportion of females that enjoyed watching psychological films who were age 15-17, there we can assume that that would be the most popular age to consider watching our film. However, a reasonable percentage of teen males actually want thriller films as well. 

TEENAGE FEMALE

TEENAGE MALE

We all found that the older generation tend to not watch psychological thriller as my audience research also shows that they prefer watching films of different genre than the thriller genre itself. We could say this may be because they don’t appreciate loud threatening music or unsettling incidents. Aspects that are also included in the thriller conventions and that are present in our thriller include, confusing occurrences that make the audience question characters or the situation, suspenseful music to enhance the audience feelings of fear and tension, interesting narrative and possibly elements of realism allowing the audience to imagine it happening in our actual lives. 

To actually target the audience, we had to include all of these aspects. Also I believe the characters in the films must appeal to them as well. For example, males would be able to relate to the main protagonist as he is a young male of the same age range and stereotypically females are likely to take an interest based on physical appearance.

In particular we thought that the technique of showing the titles and credits at the beginning in front of black screen as the film The Sixth Sense did was very frustrating as the audience were likely to feel bored so we made the conscious decision to have them run through the opening. We used our own personal experience to come to this conclusion, which I think benefits our film a lot.

SOME COMPARISONS BETWEEN OUR OPENING ANF OTHER THRILLER FILMS:


Character similarity between Ryan Gosling in 'Drive' and Ethan















Composition similarity between the interrogation scene from 'Gone Girl' to ours.

Frame from 'Skyfall' similarity in black silhouettes.