RESEARCH: Target audience

Establishing whom your target market/ audience is is a process, which is essential in making my trailer. It is important that I find out who this audience may be and what they expect and want to see from my trailer. This will then essentially help with the production of the trailer in making sure it meets the needs of the audience. The genre I am looking to find out the audience for is the thriller genre, and I could use a number of methods for this such as questionnaire and a focus group however I decided to do some internet research and ask 3 other people to collate some information.

This research helped me establish that I have a specified target audience. This is that due to the nature of the thriller genre the main age groups I will target are young adults aging 15- 25, so this will also mainly direct at middle class persons. Hopefully, it will appeal mainly to students as they can then tell their friends and then it gets around that the film/ trailer is good. Further, the trailer is aimed at both genders, as it is not directly suited to either better. So due to this I need to make sure that my trailer suits the needs of a wider age group and contain interests of this age range such as violence, enigma and gore.

The nature of the genre, thriller, is typically for a younger age group as I found out, this is due to the storylines based around the genre. I will try and use a similar storyline to a typical thriller genre as this meets the expectation as well as help with the suspense, and thrill of the film. It is a lot less likely, as I found from my research, that older people would not be interested in this genre as it is far-fetched and unrealistic for them.

Another reason why the young adults may want to watch this is to meet Maslow’s needs of belonging as all they can go as a group of friends and also being able to watch this without being scared may boost their ‘self esteem’. Further to this, both genders enjoy watching thriller films but typically boys prefer the type of content involved in a thriller film such as violence and gore meaning that the main target audience is young males. However due to some females also enjoying the genre I will target both genders to widen the target demographic this will be done by incorporating elements for each gender for example gore for male and enigma for females.

I will also include a lot of sound effects and music overlaying the motion as this is key to building suspense and is key for the audience to enjoy the film, I will research different types of potential music for this main aspect of my trailer. Also the fast paced editing included in a thriller genre is key in keeping the narrative full of enigma and captivates the audience. This is a massively important part of my trailer that I need to make sure it is not a short story but engaging enough for the audience to get an outline of the whole narrative from multiple shots of different scenes. I intend to use the aspect of ‘realism’ that the target audiences like in deciding on my location and protagonist. This is because it will become more impacting on the audience if they can relate to the trailer in all ways and that it is not to far fetched.