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

Our Target Audience:

 The target audience for our film would be aged 15-35 with predominantly men watching it, this is because our film is a gangster thriller and it would not fit covertly as a pleasant film for anyone younger than the minimum age that we have set as our target audience for someone to watch and for example some women might not enjoy its violence and plot. 

Films our Target Audience would see:

As I have mentioned in the research; we wanted to base our film on a Guy Ritchie style, and after producing the film, I feel there a number of similarities that we can pick out in comparison, for example they contain a similar plot; both misleading plot from the beginning providing a sense of mystery because whilst both films reveal the endings of their plot, the film is all about how they get to that point. Another point to highlight is the location, I feel the industrial estate on our film is relatively similar to Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, giving of the class involved in our film (very much lower class). 

The originial basis of the idea with the car in the opening of our film was based on the film 'Reservoir Dogs 1992'. There are a many similarites with our film and 'Reservoir Dogs' both are thrillers in genre and some of the plot.

As you can see the our shot is based on Reservoir Dogs()
however whilst it is similar, I feel our film experiences
more suspense and terror because of the props
e.g. mask and hammer.

We took inspiration from the boot scene in Reservoir Dogs () I felt this shot
was very striking.

However saying that our film is very similar to Guy Ritchie’s is not strictly true, as we have developed our film, redrafting the storyboard, we incorporated features that could relate a number of other films. For example my partner thought of the idea to have Masks on the four actors, this relates to the film, ‘Point Break (1991)’ in which the plot is about an FBI agent who goes undercover to catch a gang of bank robbers who wear masks as part of their disguises (this is where the mask idea came from).

Drawing from the uses and gratifications model four needs that audiences seek to have gratified by the mass media, this model helps see what points audience gain out of our film :  


1. diversion (we enjoy escapism, entertainment, release). This comes with our genre as a thriller particularly as suspense is built throughout our opening which most audiences seem to enjoy in particular our male audience because they like to enjoy escapism and feel entertained by the situation in hand for example is the victim in the boot of the car dead.. The diversion that comes with our film means that the majority of our audience wouldn't usually experience in everyday lives.


2.surveillance (we need information about what is happening in the world), although our target audience would not usually experience the plot which is taking place in our film, they will feel out of their depth because they are touching on the criminal underworld experiencing a less than comfortable location/situation in our film which leads through a nastier side of Britain than most people generally avoid. 


3.personal relationships (we like feeling part of a social group; we feel companionship) the audience is given the freedom to build an understanding of the gang that they come across in our film Take Off After, we hope that the audience will build feelings for some of those characters whether they like them or not. By doing this we are engaging the audience with our film and we can use some of the codes and conventions of our thriller to entertain them more easily because of the personal relationships gained, for example the audience will be stressing about the victim in the boot of the car in hope that they might not be killed in the end. This helps extend the film engagement even when after finishing the thriller,because the audience will continue to reflect back on those characters and moments in the film that most likely decided fate for some of those characters.


4. personal identity (we explore and reinforce our values through comparison with others), it is often very common for the viewers to build  an affinity with a particular character, it might be that character is very similar to yourself. Our film takes personal identity very carefully and although you haven't met the victim in the boot of the car (yet) you won't be surprised to provide comparisons that might be similarly to the viewers otherwise making a similarity with the other side of the gang.