Target Audience

A target audience is mainly the gender and age range that a film predominantly targets.

Knowing your target audience helps to generate profit as it essentially guarantees that a specific large group of people will be interested in your film, which then helps to deliver certain expectations or know what codes and conventions to follow - e.g. male audiences are stereotyped to be more attracted to violence whilst female audiences are drawn to romance. Knowing who you're targeting also helps you know how to market to them - younger teen audiences may be more accessible on certain social media sites as opposed to to older audiences.

Targeting Age

The age ranges that a film can target are split into certain stages of life, more notably;

• 16-17 would mean late teens that are above the age of consent and finishing high school, yet can't purchase alcohol.
• Whilst 18 year olds are just one year apart from this, they would be considered legal adults that are now of age to purchase alcohol/cigarettes, drive, vote, etc... and are also going into their first years of university.
• 21 year olds are the ones finishing university and first starting out jobs.
• 25 year olds are then starting to earn a salary from those jobs and are fully immersed in adulthood.
• 30-40 is then finally the range where people typically start getting married or having children.

Your targeted age would therefore be determined by which of these audiences best fit your film's plot and setting.

     

Targeting Gender

Gender is a lot more straightforward to target as the differences between their stereotypical wants is fairly ingrained into our minds from a young age.

Men overall are typically drawn to attractive women, violence, action sequences, etc... so horror or action films are usually targeted towards male audiences.

Women then prefer to see attractive men, romance, emotional themes... so they are the targets for genres like romance or drama.

    

Our Target Audience

Since our sequence's genre is Action/ Horror and involves a motorcycle chase, a bloody wound, and a serial killer... it is then pretty clear that we are targeting a male audience.

Whilst age doesn't play a large part in the sequence, it does contain implied violence as well as other somewhat frightening themes, and the main character throughout is clearly a teenage girl, we decided that our targeted age range would then be 16-17.