My audience profile The demographics for my audience profile is the following:

Gender: Both male and female Age: 15-20 ABC: B/E Religion: We don’t prefer to target any specific religion Education: Age 15-16 are Secondary students, 17+ are College students

and from the age of 19+ are University students Occupation: Manual workers/ students. Those who work are students

who are in University working part time Marital status: Single or in a relationship Income: Minimum wage for those who work part time Nationality: Again we do not target a specific nationality but we want our

audiences to be able to speak and understand English. The demographics that we have categorized our audience under are B and E. This is because our audiences come from a background where they are students, maybe unemployed as some discontinue going further education and look for jobs and manual workers. Also demographic B targets creative and media people and since we are making a short film this would target people who like making films such as producers/ directors and even media students who come across making something creative. We chose to target both genders because there are many boys and girls who love horror films that have jump scares, twists and cliffhangers. Therefore we did not want to limit that we are targeting because we wanted to target both male/ female. The age 15-20 I think is a perfect age to target because at that age many teenagers/ young adults like to watch movies whether it is in cinemas or at home. This is the most common hobby that they indulge in and it is always a hot topic for them to discuss with other teenagers. We do not target a specific religion or a specific nationality because we want everyone at the age of 15-20 to watch the short film as long as they understand English because the film will be in English throughout. I have learnt that my audience prefer the use of common conventions such as a twist or a cliffhanger in horror movies because that is what makes the film much more entertaining and scary as possible. My audiences like to get scared as much as possible therefore, in the film we need to create a lot of unexpected jump scares to keep the movie adrenaline pumping through the audience. Also my audiences prefer that the short film does not have a cliché storyline of a horror film because then the film is predictable and it is quicker for the audience to disengage with the movie.

What have you learnt from your audience research? From the research which we have carried out to get a deeper understanding of the likes and dislikes of our audience we have carried out a survey which is a primary research method asking them questions such as, “What they prefer in a horror film’ “What is the best horror film that they’ve watched and like” Why they liked that specific film, what they most enjoyed from watching that film so whether it was because it ended with a twist, or a sad ending etc. By asking these questions it has helped us to gain a better insight of our audience as we learnt that the information’s that we have gathered we can use it to make our short film exactly to their liking. For example majority of the audience said that they prefer a twist throughout the storyline or some sort of cliffhanger at the end, as it is one of the most common conventions of a horror film. We took this into account and conformed to both the conventions. We begin the film all calm and happy but towards the middle of the film the mood and the atmosphere of the setting changes as it become eerie and scary as the babysitter finds out that the little girl she is looking after is actually dead. This gives the story a little twist to it making it more attention worthy for the audience to watch. Also from the survey, the audience said that they prefer the setting to look as realistic as possible as it makes the film look real and believable. So for example, the main setting in a film would be the bedroom maybe, and in that bedroom there should be a bed, couple of toys on the floor, dim lighting should be used to give it a night effect, but keeping the room as simple as it can be so the audience are not distracted by unnecessary things such as the colour of the bedroom or the amount of toys that is in the room as this takes away the audience focus on the film. From this I learnt that the main location where everything happens in the film it should be kept simple because if we wanted something to go missing such as a lamp from the living room it would be more noticeable if the room had little props in it rather than if it had everything in it at once because then it wouldn’t be noticeable if the lamp went missing and it would be confusing for the audience. Furthermore I conducted a secondary research method using YouTube and I found that the specific audience that I am targeting prefer an unexpected sinister child on the film because first of all a child is seen innocent and angelic so, you would never suspect the child if anything bad happened and we challenge this by using the little girl in our film to act as the evil character surprising the audience.