Target Audience - Research

Every text needs a target audience to be aimed at. For our production, we need to know who our audience is and what the age will be, thier interests and opinions of what makes a good film to that audience. It would also be useful to know what other types of media they use and how they use it. To find out how it is done, we have looked at some case studies. Below is a case study about the target audience for the urban horror fantasy, 'Heartless'.

Case Study

For their audience research, they started by finding out their main audience, which were horror fans and their broader audience which was people aged 15-25. They used fan pages on Facebook to communicate with other fans of similar products, to engage with them and use them to create word going round about the film. They used polls on Facebook to ask potential audiences questions which could be used to structure advertising. Another case study we looked at was for the target audience of...

'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'.

Case Study 2

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was suitable for a digital campaign because its fans were already grouped together online because of the books before the film was realised so eligable fans where already about, they did this through sites such as Facebook, blogs and fan sites. They found their primary target audience was females aged over 20, They again found that Facebook was the best way to target and approach their audience as it allowed them to group the audience together through age, gender, interests etc.

This gives Dan, Dave and I a clear view on how to start our publisising for our film.

Research into Similar Products - Top Boy

Our group has been doing some product research into similar products. For this Dan, Dave and I each took a film or television drama of our choice and
analysed it, extracting helpful tips to use for our film. For my research I chose to use the popular television series 'Top Boy'. 

Top Boy is a programme about a drugs ring in South London following people through there different encounters and events. From this I was able to get a deeper view into what we needed to do and achieve in order to make out film seem more realistic and keep a better flow with camera techniques and movement etc. As well as being similar story line as our film, Top Boy also has the same target audience as us, so we will use the same advertising techniques they used to promote their series. In this series, the main character called Dushane, is now running Summerhouse (The estate in which they live) without his best-friend, Sully. His business relationship with his boss Joe has blossomed and they are about to move into the big time with a large shipment of drugs. But Dushane misses Sully, particularly when he is confronted by a new enemy. With his reputation as Top Boy on the line, Dushane must take drastic action to keep hold of his new-found power and needs Sully on side again. This dramatic yet gritty storyline is exactly what we are after for our film and is a brilliant way to gain ideas.

Camera Technique - Dolly Zoom

Whilst analysing the Jaws clip in my previous blog, I found a camera technique which I really liked. It is called the dolly zoom which is where the camera is placed on a dolly and is zoomed in on a subject for example a characters face or point of interest. The camera is then zoomed out as the dolly moves forward creating an effect which seems to be zooming out but moving in at the same time, creating a surreal effect. It can be quite unsettling and appears to undermine visual perception and create a continuous perspective distortion causing the background to change size while the subject stays the same.


Here is a link to the dolly zoom effect in Jaws (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB4bikrNzMk)

This dolly zoom effect can have strong emotional impact depending on the feeling of the scene, for instance, it could portray fright, fear, shock, surprise etc. and can add tension to a scene. It could also create a sense of vertigo and unreality, or to suggest that a character is undergoing a realisation that causes them to reassess. This is why I really like this effect as it can be used in many circumstances to portray many emotions and gives a cool looking surreal effect. I would like to incorporate this effect in to my media production as I think it would give it a professional feel to the final product. I will try to recreate this effect as an example in a blog to follow.

Here is another effective use of the dolly zoom camera effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv41W6iyyGs

And here is a video explaining it fully: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amj6RiGiTOE

Target Audience

After some discussion with Dan and Dave, we decided that our core target audience is urban drama fans. Our broader audience is mainly males but female’s as well aged 15-25. I want to collect some feedback from our target audience about our ideas to see if they will be effective and appeal to them. We can use this feedback to influence and improve our idea, ideally this will help us make the film more popular with that group of people.

To do this, we will create a questionnaire or survey to gather information about our audience and find out their interests, taste in music and what they would want from a short, urban drama film. This is very important as we only have 5-10 minutes for our film so it has to grab the attention of the viewer and we can achieve this by finding out more about our audience. From the age range, I can imagine that the majority of our audience will be on Facebook or other social networking sites, so we can use this to our advantage. As we know from the case studies, this is a really effective platform to reach an audience on.

Another way we can collect information is to use a focus group to explain our ideas to them and get some feedback. A focus group is good as it lets you interact with your audience face to face and allows discussion between the group and researchers. For this we will use some of our friends from school. From all of these this will help us to create a really effective film.

Background Music - Research

To add realism to our production, we intend to go all out on the sound this year and give the audience the full experience, for this, we are using..

- Foley Sound
- Background Music
- Dialogue
- Non-Diagetic

For the background music, we took examples from programmes and films we were watching such as 'Top Boy' and 'London Heat'. In these two examples, the background music in particular was very similar in the way they used it to portray the characters, this would come very useful in our production, For example, When we have two characters of very different natures. Using music in the background, we are able to show the differences between characters without using any dialogue. This also adds to the dramatic side of our production.

In the first scene, where the Hitman kills the Drug Dealer, There is no dialogue. But as we first see the Hitman, no music is playing and its very quite and atmospherical. Then as it jumps to the drug dealer, you instantly know the difference between the two characters because the music punches is and the match-on-action shot reveals the identity of the Drug Dealer, playing 'Old School Hip-Hop' as he is cutting up his drugs. Then as the scene progresses, the tempo changes and a much more up-beat song jumps in as he is consuming the substances, This adds space for us to use effects in the editing, One part in the second half of our first scene when the up-beat song starts, there is a multiple cut shot between the drug dealer and the hitman. Then as the song drops we use a slow motion jump shot of the hitman taking a shot of alcohol then speeds back into real time. The background music really helps to add a dramatised edge to this first scene and really gives it that edge with us now being able to use copyright music. This gives us the ability to improve our final piece and improve from last year.