Target Audience

Target Audience


The short film industry’s audience is quite specific compared that of the mainstream audience of larger full length films. There are two main groups of people who will be familiar with short films; unemployed students seeking a future in the film industry and people who are already successful in the industry. This meant that I had a short amount of time to impress the viewer. At first this seemed an advantage but at later time it seemed that this might be a negative point. I had to change the plot to fit this restriction as it lasted much longer than my alotted time. This meant that I had to condense a plot to still leave the viewer slightly confused and disorientated by a moral choice in a much smaller time than usual.

This also spurred me to think about my second problem. I needed to decide what genre I was aiming at, whether it was going to be a scary film or a thriller. I had looked at the films that closesly related to mine so I could have a base to try and place my film under. That way I didnt need to distinguish the genre so much and more towards finding the actual target audience. For example, one of the films I chose was "A clockwork orange" because it had a very specific target audience of a more artsy film audience with a hint of a thriller. I also liked the role it took for the main character being an antagonist but at the same time remained a relatably hostile and agressive character. I loved the represenetation from the film and in some ways the metaphorical nature of some of the characters and underlying themes. I tried to reflect this same effect in my short film through the use of confusion and sound effects. I wanted it to be very artsy.

Another inspiration would be the coen brothers on a directorial front as they have a constant noir feeling but at the same time, continue with the twisted and unclear plots that twist character depictions and challenge industry standard "pretty boy" actors and take on a much deeper and 3 dimensional view of films. Most of these films are based on an older male audience as the thriller genre is a male dominated genre.


The main problem I had with target audience was that I didnt know who to design my film for at first and that I wanted to innovate with my short film so at the same time I didnt have a specific genre at first. Once I got over this hurdle I realised that to pin my film under any specific genre it would have to be a thriller as it had a sense of horror but at the same time had a sense of action. I had to try and compare this to a certain film and because of this I decided to choose such films as "one flew over the cuckoo's nest", "funny games" and "No country for old men" as these all had a common morality feel at the end of them which I wanted my film to leave the viewer with.