4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our certification for our film would be a 15. It isn't certified as a 15 because it's really gory or is crude in anyway, but because we expect our film to have extremely scary connotations such as creepy, eerie music and low key lighting to set a particular mood and help build the suspense.

We choose thriller as our genre as we thought that it would most likely appeal to our target audience. Our audience is targeted at mostly teenagers and young adults, mostly ranging from the ages from 15 to early twenties. We felt that our genre would appeal to this specific age range and thrillers are probably one of if not the most successful genre in cinema generation. By our group being similar ages to our target audience, we have personally seen and experienced the impact that the thriller genre has on a teenage audience and people in their early twenties. Common methods used in thrillers are mind games, physchological themes, deaths and stalking. Young adults and teenagers are very open minded and enjoy the over-dramatic plotlines and stories that could arguably be said are at times un-realistic.
Our main characters are also teenagers themselves, and therefore our audience might be able to relate to them on many different levels. Perhaps they might be able to show some understanding towards a character, or how they might be feeling. For example during our very first few shots, one of our characters Brooke is seen running through the forest, for our audience to presume that she has been drinking at a party by the props that we have used.
The stereotype of teenagers and young adults are that they're constantly out drinking and taking drugs. So therefore not only can they relate to this character within the first few seconds, but they can also learn from the mistakes that this character might be making. Here is a photo that I have taken of friends drinking when they've been out.
However I'm not suggesting that our film targets only teenagers that drink, I'm just relaying the fact that their may be some similarities between the teenagers regarding the characters in our film. Generally we are targeting outgoing groups of young adults of both genders.
When researching Thriller movie genres on the internet I stumbled across a website called IMDB (international movie database.) On this webpage it featured a voting poll on users favourtie thriller movies. When looking further into this voting poll, i discovered that the majority of the 'favoured' thriller movies were rated at a 15 certificate. These movies included 'The Black Swan,' 'Memento' and movies that you can see in this print screen like Batman Begins and Heat. This reinforces my accusation on how the perfect rating for a thriller is a 15.
We also targeted this age group as we didn't want an audience that would be impressionable or influenced by the storyline.