Audience Profile

Audience Research Analysis 
From the research we have conducted, I have decided that my target audience should be 17-25 year old males. My personal research shows that the majority of people who would watch a thriller film are male (59%) and aged 15 to 25 (40%). However, thrillers contain many sub-genres, so perhaps with particular themes e.g. action, comedy, crime, psychological etc, our thriller may appeal to many other audiences other than our target. Many of our interviewees said that they liked action films, so perhaps if we made our film an action thriller then we could attract a wider audience and appeal to a wider range of people. We shouldn't limit ourselves to only males aged 17-25 as they are a small section of the population, as described in the following statement adapted from the national statistics data website. 

"According to the national statistics data released by the UK government in mid-2007 there were 31.0 million women compared with 29.9 million men in the UK population. It was found that boys outnumbered girls and women outnumbered men because at all ages above 31, women outnumbered men."

This shows us that up to the age of 31, boys outnumber girls. Therefore we are targeting a big section of the population, but should not limit ourselves to this segregation of the community. Many girls enjoy thrillers too, so we should include characteristics in our film that girls want to see too, to avoid limiting our audience. 

We should probably make our film more of a 15 rated film as it doesn't seem that many people under 15 would want to watch a thriller (as shown in the chart opposite).  However, our research showed that older men (45 year olds) can also enjoy thrillers so we need to try to allow our film to be appealing to a wide range of people, without putting off our main target audience of males aged 17 to 25. 

Audience Profile

This is Dan. He is 24 years old and at the higher end of our target audience age range. He lives with his girlfriend and their puppy in their own flat in Somerset. He is currently doing an apprenticeship as part of his college course and is training in management. He enjoys walking his dog, playing darts with his friends and earning money. His favourite films include I Am Legend; Batman - The Dark Knight Rises; Inception; Psycho; 2012; Hostel and The Colour Purple. His favourite hobby is creating music - he plays guitar, drums, and can sing too. He has recorded many of his own songs in professional studios and dreams of becoming an international artist in a rock band. 

He enjoys thrillers partly because he really enjoys sport and the suspense of not knowing who will win. This is reflected in thrillers because in many of them, the protagonist and antagonists are unclear and the audience are unaware of who will become victorious by the end of the film. Being 24, Dan mostly enjoys 18 rated films that are more daring with their storyline and content. Dan says "I really enjoy sitting in a cinema and literally sitting on the edge of my seat, my palms sweating and my heart racing because I have no idea what is about to happen next in the film." This is definitely a feature of thriller films, which explains why he likes them so much. Dan is our ideal target audience because he is the type of person who would enjoy a thriller film and then have the urge to tell everybody he knows about how amazing it was. Dan is often spending time on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, so he would be a good target audience because he is the type of viewer who would rave about a film that he enjoys, so the film would get a good amount of word-of-mouth advertising. His frequent social media use coincides with his love for his Xbox and PlayStation consoles, always keeping up with technology. Because Dan enjoys keeping up to date with technology, in order to attract him to watching our film we should make it quite technologically advanced (although not bordering into the sci-fi genre).