Question 4 - Target Audience

Throughout the production of our movie opening, we have asked various people for feedback on our movie openings. We chose these people after researching who our target audience should be. The majority of Rom-Coms get a BBFC Rating of 12-15, meaning that this is, realistically, the lower boundary for our target audience. We then considered the ages of characters in Rom-Coms, which varied from the teenagers of Wild Child (Moore, 2008), to the 30-somethings of Bridget Jones Diary(Maguire, 2001). After conducting this research, we initially planned on targeting the 15-34 age range. Upon evaluation and audience feedback, we adjusted this figure to 12-24, with a secondary audience being 25-34, and perhaps also tweens (8-11).

We have used characters from our target audience's age range in order to help target them, as this would increase relatability and so make them more likely to watch the film. We used a location familiar to them to also increase relatability.

We tried to have more comedic elements in our opening (such as the growl after the chess game) in order to make our movie more appealing to the lower bounds of our target audience.

The biggest issue that we could see arising with chasing the 12A rating would be caused by this line in the BBFC's classification guidelines:

Discriminatory language or behavior must not

be endorsed by the work as a whole.

We thought this might cause problems due to the fact that there is no sign, at least in the opening, of condemning of the slamming into a locker, something which could potentially be seen as discriminatory. We looked up the BBFC's definition of discrimination in order to ensure that we were not breaking the rules, we found within that definition this line:

The context in which such content may appear also has a bearing

We felt that the context of making a character a bully in the eyes of the audience would help us ensure we had a 12A rating, and so we did not adjust our opening as there was no longer any need to.

We have also made use of intertextuality, with references to Napoleon Dynamite (Hess, 2004) and Pretty in Pink (Deutch, 1986) to draw in the older part of our target audience but also the secondary target audience of 25-34.

We are confident that we have an audience for our movie, as the movie Submarine(Ayoade, 2010) shows. While this movie was a 15, it was also set in a school, and produced by an indie company.

An example of a somewhat similar teen Rom-Com would be Wild Child (Moore, 2008), which is rated 12A and done by UK company Working Title. This clearly shows that there is a market for this movie.

Please click read more if you would like to see some audience evaluations: