Question 4

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

The BBFC are in control of film classification, using a checklist of particular criteria to determine which age rating the film comes under. They are a non-governmental body that have been determining classifications in theatres since 1912 and for DVDs since 1984.  We used the BBFC’s classification criteria as a contribution towards forming our target audience by looking at the following age ratings and pinning the criteria to our film.

•   U

•   PG

•   12

•   12A

•   15

•   18

•   R18

The criteria determining age ratings are discrimination, gore, violence, sex, nudity (which can actually be shown to any age, even U if it is not sexualised), imitable behaviour and context primarily. They have the power to push forward for cuts in the movie if there are scenes they believe are inappropriate morally for any age, and can even reject movies or even further so, prosecute if that film contains illegal scenes. We have a darker theme for our film but it doesn’t breach any laws in censorship so we wouldn’t be asked to cut much if not anything by the BBFC. We believe our film would be a 15, we considered 12A since there is only mild gore (blood and scenes of violence) but understood our plot may be too dark to fit that of a 12A so we mutually agreed it fits comfortably in the 15 margin. This is because it has imitable behaviour, dark themes, violence and minor gore so 15 seems most suitable. We unanimously agreed that it isn’t bad enough to be an 18 since 18s usually contain more brutal or psychological themes with much worse behaviour and context.

The BBFC gain income by charging the movie production companies based on the length of the film, just by being an individual company. They are only granted money to cover their costs being an individual non-governmental organisation. Their fees are only organised based on the income they gain from the films they charge; a film is charged by the BBFC.

We decided that people of the C1 class and above on the demographic scale would watch our thriller since a psychological thriller will be fixed on the more attentive and focused people. Psychological thrillers tend to be aimed at the people who pay attention to detail and can follow non-chronological plots so we believed that people with more organized and administrative skills would be best at following the plot of the movie.

Our audience would be people of 15-50 targeted at all genders. We came to the conclusion that elderly audiences prefer more political and historical films such as Bridge of Spies as opposed to torture thrillers with concepts of Hostel included. We aren’t targeting a specific race or religion either, if anything we wish to encourage diverse groups of friends over the age of 15. We chose to use social media such as Youtube and Facebook to promote our product since these two are very popular amongst our target age range. This allowed us to broaden our audience further for anyone whose interest was grabbed by our product.





Having relied on diversity alone we understood that various ranges of music taste, or opinions on thrillers would all be different. But in having opened up an almost complete range of people simply by promoting to groups of people on Facebook with the use of Youtube links it allows an assortment of anyone and everyone to click simply by wording the post persuasively with a small description to bait the interest of social media users.

We gained an idea of what our audience was and what they expected with the use of Vox Pops to capture the opinions and expectations of them. Popular answers were establishing shots that created enigmas, and torture scenes that lack massive detail such as that of Casino Royale, which we gained some of our inspiration from. Our audience were a complete mix of males and females however their interests remained mutual in terms of thrillers and they liked the opening of Se7en and the torture scene of Casino Royale most popularly.