Evaluation Criteria Number 4&5

In detail, who would be the audience for your media product? And how did you attract/address your audience?

As a group we wanted our media product to appeal to a teenage audience from the age of 15 upwards. From our credit sequence, this has been achieved as there are many aspects within our credit sequence that support this age group. Before we created our media product we researched our target demographic in detail before we produced our sequence as we wanted the right audience to view it. As we researched, horror genres were liked by teenagers in majority so we decided that this audience would make our company most successful. Gender wise, our audience could be either male or female. This is because our main character is male but there are a lot of female characters with this. Lighting was key for us as we wanted our party scene to look as realistic as possible. If the party scene looked fun and convincing then the teenage viewers would be immediately interested as they would instantly want to be at a party like this. We used flashing party lights to include a lot of varied colours within the flashback scene, this included colours like red, blue, green and yellow. This made the party seem upbeat and exciting. The flashing colours also played another role - the gender of the audience. As the colours were varied and included quitea lot of blues and pinks it was able to give our film an audience of both male and female as these are gender specific colours. With music, we decided to go for something that was recent and high in the charts. This is because teenagers mainly listen to music that is popular and new. We chose 'Overdrive' by Gekko as we believe it was in the charts for a while and we knew teenagers liked this track. We did experiment with other music such as 'Can't hold us' by Macklemore but it didn't quite fit the party scene or the daytime scenes.

Props also played a huge role in target audience. For example, the use of colourful streamers at a party wouldn't be used in a party for people who are significantly older. These are often seen at parties for children/teenagers. This shows that the audience are fairly young. Another prop we used that showed up a lot in our credit sequence was plastic cups. These are used commonly at a party so we thought we would use them. From previous filming, we used glass cups and they were not effective as this made the party unrealistic. Relating back to target audience, plastic cups are often seen at parties with high school friends so we decided this would be effective and it was. We made sure that each actor/actress was wearing the correct costume for the party scene, we knew this was vital as from previous filming costume was casual and it didn't look effective or convincing so we made sure there was costume such as dresses, skirts, shirts or crop tops.

Actors and actresses were important when filming. We wanted a teenage audience to view our credit sequence. Usually, within a film famous actors/actresses is what pulls certain people in but as this was impossible we decided to go with age. We used actors/actresses from the age of 16-17. This is effective as viewers can relate to the film or scenario and the characters themselves. They can also sympthasise with certain characters if they have been in a similar situation. If we decided to use older actors this would effect the film majorly as teenagers wouldn't want to watch a party filled with older people as they could find it boring. The same goes for much younger actors.