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

When making a film target audience is greatly considered, as it determines the genre (and subgenre), marketing techniques, distribution company and also age rating, and catering to the right audience helps with the success of the film. To determine the audience for our thriller film, we looked at other thrillers similar to ours such as The Disappearance of Alice Creed and Se7en, and the types of people who watched these films. Typically, thriller films have mostly a male audience, possibly because they involve dark and violent themes.


The Disappearance of Alice Creed is a gritty and violent thriller about a kidnapping, which is similar to our film, meaning that this film was our primary inspiration for our target audience. This film appealed much more to males than to females, probably due to its dark and violent themes. Which is also probably why people under the age of 18 have watched it, and the largest number of people in a particular age group are people aged 30 - 44 years and non-US users as it is a niche film set in a fairly unknown area of the UK, meaning more of its audience comes from the UK rather than the US.



Se7en is a mystery or crime thriller, it is similar to our film as it has horror elements in it. The film's audience mainly consists of males, but still has a large female audience. In terms of age, 30 - 44 year olds and 18 - 29 year olds dominate the audience, meaning that it has a much larger and more diverse audience than The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Also, more non-US users have seen it, not necessarily UK users, but the UK is probably a big audience as the film is in English. This film is more mainstream than The Disappearance of Alice Creed, which is reflected in its large audience from the number of votes on IMDb.



Our audience

Our thriller film is similar to both Se7en and The Disappearance of Alice Creed, meaning it would have a similar audience of 30 - 44 or 18 - 29 year old males mostly from the UK. As our film is more similar to The Disappearance of Alice Creed, because of its niche subject and location, also because its low budget and independent and has similar themes, our audience would be more similar to this film.

A typical viewer of our film is Callum, a 30 year old man from England, who likes films with violent and mature subjects, which are dark in tone and fairly complex. He enjoys films set in the UK, as well as old UK based rock bands. These things also somewhat reflect his social background as he comes from a British lower/middle class family, so prefers gritty films, and unpolished and grungy sounding music, such as old rock. Callum listens to 6 Music which is an alternative radio station which focuses on playing a wide variety of music, including a lot of unheard and new music by upcoming artists in various genres, mainly focusing on indie guitar music, Callum likes medias which help develop and build new talent, including low budget indie films. He likes The Disappearance of Alice Creed, as it is based in the UK, and is violent and unlike many mainstream films he has watched, it also has a more serious tone than other films he has watched. He also likes the film Se7en because of its serious tone and dark themes, as well as the mystery and complex characters. Callum likes thriller films that play on fears such as abduction and death, he likes films which involve mystery and encourage the viewer to think about the film. He prefers to watch films on cheap streaming sites such as MUBI which also includes a lot of films he likes, rather than mainstream sites such as Netflix, where he can't find many films he likes, and also Cinemas as they don't often show films he's interested in.