Fun Hong- Evaluation: Question 4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

Creating the questionnaire
By creating a questionnaire, it enabled us to draw ideas in order to satisfy our target audience of who we asked. Overall, the questionnaire has helped us plan out and make the final media product and see how we can challenge or develop conventions from thrillers. The questionnaire included questions such as what were their favourite thriller movies, what conventions they recognise in thrillers. We had also put different films into the questionnaire and had asked people which they thought were thrillers. Surprisingly, most people were not able to categorise which of the following films were thrillers, which could be the reason of them not thinking about whether it was a thriller or not if they had seen it.  These questions had helped us especially to plan our media product, because we wanted to see whether we can draw out the thriller aspect of our opening sequence a bit more, and to see whether our target audience would be able to identify Red Marks as a thriller.

Results:

From this pie chart, the majority of peoples favourite sub-genre was psychological. This enabled our ideas to become more creative, as psychological thrillers could be experimented in many ways. In Red Marks, the psychological aspect is the whole journey where Eleanor Park walks towards the toilets and the whole flash backs she has about the murder she had committed. This would therefore mean that the audience would be intrigued in watching a psychologically unstable protagonist brutally victimising other students.

What institution our audience preferred 

The vast majority of our audience preferred our media product to be independent. This would benefit us because it would allow us to bring out more creativity, as we could identify conventions from mainstream films, and challenge/develop them. Overall, this had allowed us more freedom, because we were draw out ideas and not having the fear of it not being classified as a mainstream.

From the results of our questionnaire and our final cut, our audience for Red Marks would be:

Gender: Females- as our protagonist is a female character, which subverts the conventions of thrillers who are mainly men.

Age: 16-18 Year Old

Occupation: Students- as it is based in a school, students are more likely to be interested in watching Red Marks

Examples of how we've applied our results into our opening sequence:

The use of parallel editing fulfils the audience's need of it being a psychological thriller because its as though they are going through the journey with the protagonist, which is used in the opening of Psycho. In the parallel editing used whilst Eleanor is walking, the constant use of flash backs could also confuse the audience, which fits in with the independent conventions of independent institutions allowing their viewers to be confused, so that ask themselves questions, and want to watch on in order to get resolutions for their questions further on into the film.