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

During research for our horror film I came across some user ratings on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363547/ratings for the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake- a film which primarily inspired our opening credits.

As the bar chart above shows, the category that on average gave the highest rating was The under 18's, predominantly male under 18's.  We predict that this category like horror films in particular due to the content of blood, gore, violence etc which stereotypically would appeal to a more youthful and masculine age/gender group. Due to this demand from the male under 18 category we decided upon incorporating all these things somehow in our film opening. We thought we would include a threat and hint at some violence (the death of the victim) whilst not showing it as it is only a 15 certificate and we didn't want to reveal too much as it is only supposed to be the first 5 minute introduction to a horror film opening. We also included the 'bloodied hand' which unintentionally looked not dissimilar to the hand emerging from the ground in the image to the left. The only difference is that the fingers were also straightened and it was covered in blood instead of dirt, and is was banged against a window pane.

Deciding a primary target audience of under 18's this is why we decided to cast actors under 18, so that our target audience could to some extent relate to the characters/actors. This decision was reinforced after we pitched our film to fellow classmates (of the same age as us -16/17) and they said that it appealed to them and our feedback sheet commented on how we had a "clear target of audience is identified".
Having a target audience of under 18's consequently made our certificate 15.If a film has been given a 15 certificate by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification), this means that people only aged 15 or over can watch the film.

However, just because our target audience will be predominantly males (shortly followed by females which is our secondary target audience) under 18's doesn't mean that our content should only cater for the under 18 age range.  We noted from Dawn of the Dead's user rating bar chart that the film was still quite highly rated up until the 30-44 age group. This is when we decided that we would play on a fear of older audiences whilst still letting younger audiences feeling like they can relate to the cast, and we will do this by casting younger actors and actresses and give them the role of zombies, which will portray today's adolescent "ASBOs". This will hopefully exploit older audiences' fears of teenagers of today as they are generally seen as a threat to society.

As seen in the image above, all 4 of our actresses are of a similar age, which like I stated previously, can hopefully mean our primary audience (16-19) can relate to them and our older audiences (30-44) can hope to feel threatened and intimidated by the feral looking zombies on the left.