Audience Research

I already had a key piece of information in terms of audience from my initial brief:

15-25yr old males and females


Because the brief also described the film as a mainstream action film finding out the key genres this target audience tended to watch was unnecessary.


even though 15-25 isn't a large age range, it encompasses a wide variety of people, with somewhat different overall tastes, as the minimum age is 15 then a certain amount of grittiness is to be expected from the film. From this  my thoughts were that to make a film appropriate to the target audience the film should attempt to look like a larger budget production instead of an indie production, as these are more likely to appeal to the target audience as a whole, as opposed to a smaller bracket of it. 


I also looked to IMDB, looking at the kind of audiences action films drew, specifically films based on video games.


Tekken

Aged under 18	285	6.2
Males under 18	258	6.2
Females under 18	25	6.3
Aged 18-29	8,219	5.0
Males Aged 18-29	7,707	5.0
Females Aged 18-29	469	5.6

Lara croft

Aged under 18	894	6.4
Males under 18	622	6.3
Females under 18	263	6.6
Aged 18-29	35,352	5.6
Males Aged 18-29	28,707	5.5
Females Aged 18-29	6,455	6.0

I also looked at the action film the matrix

Males under 18	5,536	8.8
Females under 18	1,118	8.2
Aged 18-29	254,728	8.8
Males Aged 18-29	218,129	8.9
Females Aged 18-29	34,921	8.4

What was clear from doing this research was that in terms of viewing figures, male viewers far outnumbered females. To combat this the obvious change would be to incorporate a female protagonist, however from looking at both the matrix which has trinity in a key female role and Lara Croft being the main character in tomb raider, it is clear that a key female character alone isn't enough to create a film which would also appeal to a female audience

.

From this chart and research into viewing habits, I found that on average females tended towards films which focused more on characterisation and story, as opposed to the action heavy films men tended to favour. a way to address the female portion of my assigned target audience would be to have a greater focus on characterisation and story , this would however be addressed in the film as a whole, and would have little effect on the opening.

Therefore from this research it would be best to focus on the conventions of action film openings and use them to inform my own product, as they would already encompass the aspects included to appeal to the target audience in the opening.