Research Into Target Audience

Please see my presentation on slideshare:

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Target Audience is quite a difficult thing to think about. Although I did a small scale survey among my friends, I am not sure this really proves much. Researching who the target audience for your film is is actually quite an odd thing to do - film producers already know who their audience is. Of course they research them, but not in the same way - they are looking for what appeals to this audience and how they can match that. Often they are just using the established audience for another film that was a similar genre. It would be more realistic for us to say who we are targeting and then see how our film appeals to this group.

In my presentation I looked at broad demographics, but this article is interesting because it suggests there is a manipulative quality to the way the teen audience are seen by the film industry:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/apr/07/cabin-in-the-woods

That means that teenagers such as ourselves making psychological thrillers / horrors is even more strange as we are making a film in the genre that punishes us. I think the real reason we are drawn to this genre is explained here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/apr/10/cabin-woods-horror-universal-genre

This article  says that everybody likes films that end in death and chaos because bad things happen in every society and we all need a way of dealing with it.