Audience profiling

Audiences who have gone to the cinema to watch your film after being gripped by an exciting and intriguing film will be focused and attentive to the storyline and will be far more involved than those who are sitting down on their sofa ready to watch a television drama. A target audience of a film is defined primarily by their gender and age however; other important factors also come into play. Someone’s psychographic is just as important as their demographic; a person’s psychographic covers their personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle.

The typical audience of a crime/psychological thriller are rated 18 because of the violence and explicit nature of many films within the genre, these themes can often be disturbing and unsettling for younger viewers. It is very easy for viewers to understand the reasoning for age ratings of film by simply looking at the back of the DVD case or on websites like IMDB. For example, the film Se7en is a thriller which is rated age 18. 

 

At the website www.bbfc.co.uk there are detailed explanations of what content a film has depending on the age rating. Whilst many thrillers are rated at 18 our opening sequence would be a 15 as it will include strong violence. Within an 18 rated film there can be scenes of sexual violence however within our film There may be detailed verbal references to sexual violence (for example descriptions of rape or sexual assault in a courtroom scene or in victim testimony) but any portrayal depiction of sexual violence would be discreet and justified by context. Brief scenes of sexual violence or verbal references to sexual violence can also be included within a 15 rated film, we could make strong hints towards the nature of this to paint a better picture of the killer’s mind-set and how he views women but we would not need to explicitly show these scenes.

I used the website http://www.bbfc.co.uk/what-classification/15 to determine whether our opening sequence would be appropriate for an aged 15 audience.

The audience of shutter island is very similar to that of Red Lights which is a thriller film. The key target audience of red Lights are between the ages of 15 and 34, this is quite a large range of audience and the gender ratio is split 60:40 between male and female. 

A large majority of the target audience for The Equalizer is aged 15-24, this is very similar to the target audience of our crime-thriller. The audience is mostly male at 70% of the audience. 

Sherlock Holmes's target audience is very evenly split between male and female audience. The age of the audience for Sherlock Holmes is broader than we intend for ours to be more focused on 15 to late twenties however, it will still have the potential to appeal to a broader audience.