Who would be the audience for your media product?

In a questionnaire I done for people to answer, I asked them if they would be likely to watch a Gangster film. I asked the people within my class, and every single girl replied saying no, however the boys, aged 16-17 said they would. This showed me that the genre gangster was more directed at boys and didn’t interest girls as much. I only asked my class but if I wanted to get a more exact result I could have asked more people. However I know that my dad enjoys watching these films and others within my group said the same so we came to the conclusion that our target audience for our media product was aimed at males aged between 18- mid 40’s. I think males enjoy this type of genre because it is more cheeky and humorous and sneaky selling etc. which is why we included all these three conventions within our media product. I think the reason men appeal to this genre of film more than girls is because it’s more manly and rough, whereas a stereotypical comment would be that most girls prefer to watch romantic comedies and girly films. I think men feel manly watching this genre of film and the conventions are more suited to males then females. When asking my class my questionnaire the boys aged 16/17 said they enjoyed watching gangster films, however the typical conventions of a gangster genre is smoking, swearing and sometimes even violence and illegal things. For this reason we have had to make our target audience 18-40 instead of 15-40 because the age certificate would be eighteen. However 15 year olds would still be able to watch our film when out on DVD etc.

How did you attract/address your audience?

We attracted our audience by making the two minute opening quite comical and by including the action of the products that they’ve been stealing and all the dodgy dealing. We made it quite rough and manly so it would be more appealing to men. We included all the conventions included in the film openings that we researched so as to attract and address the audience that we were targeting. We included similar locations, costumes, characteristics etc. I used social networking sites such as Facebook to find out what people thought of our final media product. I want to find out different people’s opinions, but more importantly what my target audience thought of our final media product that we made to see if it met the conventions used in similar media products. We didn’t include violence or swearing however we attracted our audience by including smoking within our media product which is a typical convention used in gangster genre films.