Audience Research

Target audience is an important thing to consider and research when making a film because if you do not know what genres are popular with which audiences, you may target it at the wrong type of audience. If your film is target at the wrong target audience then they will not be interested, therefore it may be difficult to persuade people to pay to watch the film or buy the DVD.

For my audience research, I need to find out information about horror/thriller films and what age range goes to watch them and what genders they are more popular with. To do this, I am going to read through the BFI statistical yearbook to find out the information that I need.

After reading through the BFI yearbook, I have decided on an audience between the ages of 15-24 year  olds. This is because, this is the age range that generally go to the cinema more often therefore are likely to watch more films. 

In the BFI yearbook, it tells me that 15-24 year olds go to the cinema more than any other age range. In the graph above, it says that in 1997, 15-24 year olds were 47% of the people that went to the cinema and even thought that can decrease over the years up to 2011, it is still a larger percentage of the cinema audiences than any other age range.

Unfortunately, this is the only relevant information that I could find in the BFI year book about audiences. However, I think that 15-24 year olds are a good target audience for my film opening because teenagers are the main characters in the film so this makes it more relatable to the audience as they would be able to connect more and understand their feelings and emotions. If the target audience was an age group such as 45+, they may not understand the storyline as well or understand how or why the characters are acting the way they are, simply because they cannot relate as well.

Another reason I think that 15-24 year olds are a good target audience is because most horror films have a certificate of 15. I would not make sense if the film was targeted at people younger than 15 because they would not be able to buy a ticket at a cinema or buy or rent the DVD, because they are too young.







To try and find out more information, I compared my film with one which was very similar in genre and style of film. The film I used was Paranormal Activity. The reason I am using this as an example is because it is a similar documentary style film and is a psychological thriller, which is the type of film I want to create.









The screenshot on the right is some statistics of who went to watch Paranormal Activity and what age they were. This information tells me that more females watched Paranormal Activity with 51% female and 49% Male. This is not a big difference in percentage so this tells me that this type of horror film is generally appealing to both genders. 55% of people who went to watch it were 15-24 years old. This is quite a big chunk of the audience which shows that this type of film is defiantly most popular with a certain age range, which happens to be 15-24. These statistics back up my decision for my target audience and I think Paranormal Activity is a good film to compare to because it is very similar.