Q4-Who would be the audience for your production

It was important for us to make clear who our audience and to understand the demographics of our target audience. At first we needed to link our audience to our chosen genre. The genre of our production was drama and so it would be easy stereotype the audience of other drama films to ours. We understood that not all drama productions are the same and each brings in its own type of audience. A clear example of this would be the audience which would watch the Titanic and the audience who would watch My Sisters Keeper. We also needed to understand the social back ground of our audience and keep in mind the secondary audience as well.
A typical drama film would produce an audience which would contain mainly women between the ages of 25-45. Drama films are associated with emotion which women seem to embrace more than men. The percentage of women of who watched the Titanic was 68 which is over half the audience. This backed up what we had already presumed but this did not mean that we ruled out men completely. We saw men as the secondary audience who would be dragged to the cinema by their partners. We knew that it would be important that we addressed men with as much importance as women as they could hold the key to our success. It is said that over fifty thousand dates take place each week according to a research site. One of the most popular venues for these dates was the cinema. Our secondary audience (men) may invite women on a date and use the cinema as the destination. Knowing that a majority of women find drama films interesting they may choose this over maybe an action film or horror which is not as popular with women. Going back to who are target audience will be , after looking at the information above we was sure on that we were going to target both women and men but what we had not decided on was what social class we were going to target.
The demographics of an audience vary as there are different types of social classing. We have the higher, middle and lower classes which all have their own likes and dislikes of film genre. We understood that the higher class may not understand out production as well as other classes as we did not have a real budget to work on. You would associate the higher class with mainstream films with blockbuster budgets and so we ruled out targeting the higher class. This means we were left with the middle and lower class which are both similar when it comes to what film genre they prefer. As our film is indie this means that we would only be available in certain cinemas or festivals around Britain. As we are also in the middle of an economic crisis it is also important to think about ticket prices. The lower class will be struggling at this period of time and so going to the cinema may be a luxury rather than something to do for the weekend. This is why we narrowed it down to only the middle class. Through research we discovered that 78% of people who attend the cinema are from the middle class. We also discovered that an astonishing 89% of people who attended the reading indie film festival were from the middle class. Theses result showed us that by targeting the middle class we would be placing ourselves in a position in which we would could take advantage of the current economic situation and were actually target people who will be more likely to be interested in our production then others.
Going back to the different types of audience’s associated to drama films; we needed to make sure that we targeted the audience which were interested in a drama production which included many emotional and hard hitting scenes. To do this we looked at other films similar to ours and analysed the type of audience they bought to the cinema. What we found is that the target audience was both men and women form the ages of 30-50. This was because the film included many scenes which were not suitable for a younger audience. This was similar to our production and we decided we would take the same approach. If you look at another drama production such American Beauty you will see that they have a much younger target audience as there film does not include such an emotional storyline.
Taking in all the information which we had gathered we came up with target audience for our production. We decided that we would target women as our main audience and men as our secondary; this would show that we are not stereotyping men to a certain genre. Both women and men would belong to the middle class and be between the ages of 20-40. From our research we know that by targeting the middle class we are giving our selves an advantage in actually making our production successful, and having the age group between 20 and 40 we are making sure that we are not exposing young children to the issues in our production which may not be suitable for them.