Audience Profiling

After researching into target audiences for the thriller genre, it became clear that the majority of people who watch this genre are males who are under 35 years. For this reason, I think that we should aim our film at male teens up to late 20s.

UK Film Council
Firstly, I Iooked at the UK Film Council who are the strategic body for film in the UK and provides an interface between the Government and the industry.

The Film Journey
They suggest that we undergo a 'film journey' - the journey to becoming passionate about film that can be broken into a number of stages, equivalent to different levels of engagement with film.

For example:

1) Between the ages of 4 and 11, we approach 'film as entertainment' and mainstream films, such as Star Wars and Disney films, tend to be the most watched.



2) During our teenage years, we begin to look beyond the mainstream titles and choose films to represent and build on who we are so we approach 'film as identity'.




3) By early adulthood, we begin to conceive 'film as culture' and we look beneath the surface of the film and they become subject to our critical analysis while we continue to watch films that are out of our comfort zone in terms of what is 'accepted'.

4) The final stage is 'film as a career' where people move into the film industry and is often something these people have worked hard for.

Following the 'film journey' guidelines, I would suggest that we aim for teens and adults as our film would possibly slightly more alternative based on the fact that it's an ecological thriller but has elements of mainstream themes such as conspiracy.

Audience Typology
The UKFC also presented a guide to the types of audience that a film could aim itself at:

1) Mainstream - who are likely to only watch the big, Hollywood blockbusters.
2) Mainstream Plus - who mainly watch blockbusters yet occasionally opt for a more alternative choice
3) Aficionados - have a wider, more adventurous mix of films and often view foreign titles
4) Film buffs - prefer films with a more extreme, esoteric and challenging subject matter rather than mainstream titles.

I concede that our film would fit into the 'mainstream plus' band as our film would contain mainly mainstream elements although there are alternative parts as well.

The Interpreter
This film (2005) is about an interpreter tries to bring down a larger organisation that is covering up an assassination attempt they are about to pull off which bears similarities with our film which is about a scientist who has to take on the larger entity of the government who are covering up the secret that global-warming is occurring at a faster rate than expected. I conducted some research into the opinions of people who saw this film and found that males preferred this sort of film to women.

This graph clearly demonstrates that this film was most popular with teenage males while males aged 20-29 also appeared to enjoy this film. For this reason we will aim our film towards the younger male population.

This chart shows the popularity of different genres for teens between 12 and 17 in the US. Although these statistics are for the US, we can still glean the information we need. This shows that when asked if they enjoy the Suspense/Mystery (Thriller) genre, 51% answered postively. This means over half of the teen population enjoy thriller films, making them the perfect target audience for our film.

Our Target Audience
To allow our film to look attractive for our target audience, we would have to tailor the props and costume to fit the demographics of this audience. For example, in the first scene we would have to use a drink that younger males would like, i.e, we would not use fruit juice or wine as they are predominantly drank by females, instead we could use whisky which is predominatly seen as a very male drink, as shown by this advert:

For our film, the story would revolve around the 'end-of-the-world'  theme and the action rather than a love interest for one of the characters as this would not appeal to males. The use of technology in our film, such as the laptop, would tantalize the male population, especially teens, who are into technology while we would have to consider the sort of soundtrack we would want as we would need something to build the tension in the opening sequence but also something that would interest our target audience, a teen to late 20s male.