Audience

This is an extract by Paul Wells from the Story of Audience. it talks about the diversity of changing audience who watch films of the horror/thriller genre. The part of the text that has been highlighted refers to the younger audience. This is the most important age range to our group for 2 reasons:

• it is our target age group
• this is the audience whom are targeted by the industry as this audience have the highest percentage of disposable income which is spent on media as a whole

Some parts of our film have included some of its interest by chance, such as the bloodletting and gore, we aim to gore when the protagonists are murdered by the antagonist. We also aim to improve or help solve some of the problems present in this article, such as the disengagement with the genre, by making our film as interesting and gripping as possible.

Questionnaire
What age category do you fit into?
15-25
26-35
36-55
56+

Roughly, how often do you watch a thriller film?
Once a week
Once a month
Every couple of months
Twice a year
Once a year
Never

On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest), how do you rate the thriller genre of entertainment?
1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10

Which sub-genre of thriller would you find the most interesting to watch?
Disaster thriller
Psychological thriller
Crime thriller
Romance thriller

What kind of narrative would you prefer in a psychological thriller?
Plot twists
Time distortion
Cross narrative stands
Conspiracy

Do you prefer a film to...
Challenge you as a member of the audience
Explain the plot fully as it goes on

If you have watched them, rate the following films out of 10
From Hell
Scream
Saw
Chainsaw Massacre
Taken


We gave this questionnaire to more than 50 people, most of whom are media students of have studied media at some point in their life. The bar charts below show our results:

From this research we can conclude that the thriller genre is liked by a widespread audience, however the most attracted age our the younger people aged from 15-35








Classification
Before classifying our film, we referred to the British Board Film Classification (the BBFC) website to view the different guidelines for each classification. There are six different ratings: U, PG, 12A, 15, 18 & R18. These guidelines refer to the levels of strong language, nudity, crime/violence and theme. We first looked at the guidelines of a 12 classification film, however under violence, it states that There can be no emphasis on injury or blood, having such a classification would limit the intensity of our thriller. The guidelines given for a 15 classification are as follows:

• Language - there may be frequent use of swear words and other offensive words if justified by the context used in
• Violence - can be strong as long as it does not dwell on pain or injury; however the strongest gory images are likely to be unacceptable

This classification fits well with our storyline and script so we gave our film a certificate 15

Link for guidelines: http://www.bbfc.co.uk/download/guidelines/BBFC%20Classification%20Guidelines%202009.pdf