Who would be the audience for your media product?
The target audience of any media product is largely based on the content of the film, especially the aspect of genre. This is because different social stereotypes are attracted to different genres of film for example romantic comedies would appeal to the stereotypical female, possibly in her early 20’s+ and Action thrillers appeal to stereotypical male of almost any age (despite the 12 and 15 age certifications often given to these films for the level of violence). For this reason it is important that before we can suggest a target audience, we can identify a genre for our film to fall into. Despite us only having an opening sequence we can identify that if the film were to be continued on it would probably become a kind of dark drama indie film. From this we can then begin to identify a target audience.
To begin with it is important to consider the age certification that would most likely be given to our film by the BBFC and other film classification boards around the world. From our opening sequence we can see that there are already some adult themes present including drug abuse and suicide. According to the official BBFC guidelines for 2009 “No work taken as a whole may promote the misuse of drugs and any detailed portrayal of drug misuse likely to promote or glamorise the activity may be cut. Works which show drug misuse while emphasising the dangers may receive less restrictive classifications than works that present drug misuse in a neutral manner.”
Considering that our opening sequence depicts the drug user as a man who is extremely unhappy and at the end of 2 minutes takes his own life I would say that we are not glamourizing drug use so on this issue we may escape the boundaries of the 18 classification. The Suicide theme in the sequence however means that we could not but classified with a 12 or below because, according the BBFC website for a 12/12A certificate: “Dangerous behaviour (for example, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on detail which could be copied, or appear pain or harm free. Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised.”
This means that our classification would most likely land us with a 15 certificate which is quite a typical certificate for a dark indie drama film, this means that our target audience would start at 15 however this kind of genre is generally more appealing stereotypically to adults in their 20’s to 40’s. This may be because they usually have elements that require more thought on the audience’s part as well as usually having characters that are usually glamourized versions of everyday people of the same age as the audience that this audience can relate to.
A similar kind of dark drama, ITV’s TV series ‘Whitechapel’ has on the ITV website a target audience of middle class females. This could also be true to our film because of the complexity of storylines that could form from our opening sequence that are typical of the genre. Stereotypically middle class people like to think more about what they watch whereas working class people just want to watch. I would however not agree that our film would be targeted at just women but at both sexes because there is nothing that suggests women are more interested in this kind of film than men.
Willheart 