Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your product? 

From the start and throughout the opening scene of The Absence, it is evident that it is not suitable for young children under the age of 15. This is because all of the conventions used, the non-diegetic sound and the content inside the film would be too much for a child to see, especially considering the fact that The Absence is a Thriller movie. The film is rated a 15 certificate rating due to the content inside the film. Teenagers and adults whom like thriller films and would want to be tested throughout the film will defiantly be the ones who want to give watching The Absence a go. Our target audience is aimed at those who enjoy a scary movie, but not to the extent of blood and gore to get them excited as The Absence does not offer this. Instead, those who enjoy being kept on the edge of their seat and experience tension throughout will be the perfect target audience to watch the film.

From looking at studies taken, we have found our that males are more likely to watch Thriller films than females, and although our film is not specified to a particular gender, we suspect more males will watch The Absence than females. We have followed the typical conventions of a Thriller or Horror movie and gave the role of the victim, and main protagonist - Nicole, to a petite, blonde, young female who would usually be seen as vulnerable and unable to defend herself therefore making her a more exciting character as it is evident to the audience from the start that something is going to happen to her. We also have a male antagonist whom we do not get to see a lot of, for the reason of keeping his identity hidden. By having both male and female characters in our film, this has made it obvious that the film is not aimed towards one specific genre.

From doing previous research and looking at The BBFC age classifications, we decided to not include strong violence so that we could lower our age rating down from an 18. We felt by including content in our film so that it would be rated lower than an 18 would allow us to get the most successful results for our film for a number of reasons. The first was because if we included a lot of violence in our film, we would have to have a rating of 18 which would not be very good for our film. This is because having such a high age rating cuts off a lot of our target audience and therefore would affect profits in our film. A lot of our target audience would be around the ages of 15-17 as this is around the age of the characters who are casting in The Absence and by getting a higher rating, these people would not be allowed to watch our film in the cinema. Considering we have a low budget and The Absence will be shown in independent cinemas, we want to get as many people seeing our film as we possibly can. However, on the other hand, we do not want to rate our film too low, for example a 12, as people will think that it will not be worth watching due to the low rating, they will assume the content inside will not be exciting or thrilling enough for them so they will not bother going to see it. We think that by having the film rated a 15 this will give the target audience an idea of what is inside the film and allow them to decide whether or not they want to see the film. A majority of Thriller movies are rated a 15 and as for our target audience of 15-25, we are aware that ages outside of these brackets will watch the film for different reasons.

Here is my Voki for a typical audience member http://www.voki.com/site/create?VkId=13829080&chsm=972cecd007adef667f0b57cd3c32505d&share=sharing