Fadila Kara Question 4

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

   From the beginning we had planned our   target audience to be young females aged between   15 to 18 year olds. This we felt would help us personally as we are all seventeen and therefore we could account from our own experiences within the school environment such as social groupings or body consciousness.  Young girls in society today experience a number of issues concerning body image, relationships, social status. Therefore we felt that the issues would particularly be relatable to girls. Rather than feeling detached and alien to the plot outline, there would be more of an understating of her perspective.  I believe this is more thrilling as feeling more self involved in the narrative gives the audience a more of chilling experience.

·         We had to undertake audience research to acknowledge what elements of psychological thrillers they preferred.  For example we   found that the most important thing to them was the music that is played through out a thriller.  Therefore  we  decided to  use  non- diegetic  music  throughout  our  opening  so that  it  would create  a similar  atmosphere  to  the openings of  other psychological  thrillers. 

·           Furthermore  one of  the  questions that we also  asked  when  we  did the audience  research was if  they  preferred to  have  an understanding character,  or a  problematic one.  When we totalled up which one they favoured, the majority preferred a problematic character. 

        As a  result of this we then decided that our main character would be disturbed and revealed to the audience as unstable from the beginning. Not only did we express this in the very opening scene where she is rapidly cutting parts of the bodies off models in magazines but even in our credits we had images on the diary of cut up pieces of different body shapes. This was already revealing to the audience that our main protagonist was unstable psychologically and therefore preparing the audience immediately for the psychological element to unravel further into the narrative. We chose this approach over slowly and subtly hinting at a disturbed character in the opening. We felt that we threw the audience right into the story line causing them to feel on edge and unstable themselves.