Our film is mainstream, so our goal is to target a wide range of audience members. We’ve chosen to target demographic groups C, D and E, which includes the unemployed, students, blue collar workers and un-skilled/semi-skilled workers. We’ve intentionally left out high social class groups, such as A and B, as we have taken into account that upper-classed citizens would not be able to engage with the characters or relate to the events of the film. From a stereotypical point of view, it is also likely that people within demographic groups A and B would not appreciate the language, sexual references or general rude sense of humour the film contains.
More specifically, our ideal target audience member would either be a male or female between the ages of 15 and 24. Although 3 out of the 4 protagonists are male, and explicitly targeting a male audience would mean that all of our audience members would be able to fully engage with the characters and events of the film, we have chosen to include females in our target audience as the style of humour is extensive and could just as easily reach out to female audience members as it could to males.
We chose the age range of 15-24, with 15 being the minimum age of a person that would be allowed to view our film, due to certification purposes. Although we have stated that our oldest ideal audience member would be 24, our film may appeal to people within their 30’s, 40’s or even 50’s. We chose the age of 24 as an estimation for when our target audience member may grow too mature for the style of comedy used in the film.
A film that inspired the inner workings of our film opening and targets a very similar audience to us is the film Superbad (2007). Like Superbad, our film is certified as ‘15’ and has a ‘high school geek’ theme. Superbad is also a mainstream comedy film which targets a mass audience and made a gross revenue of £109,006,682.
Superbad played an important role in the planning stage of our G321 film opening. When looking into comedy, we were unsure as a group whether targeting such a small audience when trying to produce a mainstream film would coincide with a film based in such a major genre. But when we started researching existing films with similar themes and characters, such as Superbad, Step Brothers (2008) and Napoleon Dynamite(2004), we found that the combination of a small audience and a mainstream film was actually successful for films within comedy. This knowledge enabled us to create a foundational base for who our target audience members should be, and allowed us to develop our ideas and become more specific in how to attract and approach them.
