Who would be the audience for your media product?

We used the BBFC guidelines in order to work out the age group that would be suitable for our media product. We also did this before we did our shoot so that we could have the biggest audience as possible. We didn’t want to include anything that would push our thriller up to be an 18 rated rather than a 15 as then it would limit our target audience. We also used similar films and looked at the type of audience they had attracted. The content of the film makes it a 15 as it fits in with the guideline of; ‘Strong threat and menace are permitted unless sadistic or sexualized’. We do have the strong threat element however none of it is directly sexualized. However looking at the 12A guidelines our thriller may also fit in that as the guideline for Horror is 'Moderate physical and psychological threat may be permitted, provided disturbing sequences are not frequent or sustaine’. This gave us more freedom with editing and shooting as it meant we had a bit of leeway with getting into the 15 guideline.

 Alongside the research into the BBFC and other films like our media product, we sent out an audience questionnaire in order to see what type of thriller and what aspects of a thriller they looked for. We tried to include as many aspects that the audience we keen on as possible in order to widen our target audience. We asked questions about the types of thriller that they liked, and The questions on our questionnaire that helped us most to specify our target audience were;

Age range;

Opening preferences;

These two questions gave us the guidelines to our thriller, we had to make it within the 15 age rating and go for a more subtle psychological thriller rather than something big and bold. To fit within this rating we had to fit within the BBFC’s guidelines. This was reasonably easy as we had no intentions of showing any drug taking, we did show smoking, however we did not promote the idea of smoking so it fits into the BBFC guidelines. Also there is no violence shown, it is all implied and to fit in with the BBFC’s guidelines dangerous behavior has to be shown not dwelled on.

We decided that our most likely target audience was between 15 and 30. It may attract people older that 30 however we believe that our main audience will be within the ages I earlier specified. These could also be from any ethnic background so long as the person themselves enjoyed the thriller genre as a whole.