Preliminary Audience Research
A key part of my audience research is to learn firstly who my audience is and secondly their wants, needs and desires along with their preconceptions and methods of reading situations.
In looking at who my audience is I used my previous research into short films (http://a2mediaresearch.blogspot.com) to provide me with a base knowledge of the audience I would get, whom may not be my intended target audience. Short films do not often make much money and so mass audiences cannot be achieved, this presents me with my most likely audience, short filmmakers, media students and film festival attendees. However my film is going onto both my blog and Vimeo, therefore my audience is significantly widened. The members of the audience that are connected with short film will be my harshest critics and so the story and product must be effective, to both the more educated and less educated audience members.
To gain an idea of what my audience will assume I asked the following question to 20 people, ‘Of the following definitions of paedophile, which one do you most agree with? A. a person, especially a man, who is sexually interested in children (Cambridge online) B. The act or fantasy on the part of an adult of engaging in sexual activity with a child or children (The Free Dictionary) C. A sexual perversion in which children are preferred as sexual partner (International Law Dictionary). I got some varied answers as well as some strange reactions for those that I asked. This reaction showed me the large amount of discontent and unease at even using the word. The definition that most people agreed with was A with 11 people, then B with 5 people and C with 4. This shows me how the majority of my audience members are preconditioned to assuming that someone accused of being a paedophile is a man. This is vital information in forming my character through the eyes of both my own image and the audiences’ image.
In-depth Audience Research
