Target Audience

Demographics

The short film industry’s audience is quite niche compared to the audience that are targeted for larger films and conglomerates. For example, the most common types of audiences that are familiar with the short film industry is students that are unemployed, who want to go into the film industry and people who have been successful within the film industry. Due to the types of audiences involved within the short film industry, they seem to be quite a younger audience because of demographics, such as students or unemployed young people. Students studying film at college or university tend to look for inspiration from other filmmakers work, resulting in them becoming a key demographic of the target audience. Also, short films are usually distributed on a range of social media sites and these forms of media are dominated by the younger generation. There is roughly an equal number of male and females who are part of the target audience for short films. However, due to the high number of females interested within the short film industry they are aimed for towards the female audience, which results in a far less use of techniques such as the ‘male gaze’ theory. In addition, particular social classes can be seen within the target audience for short films for example, research suggests that the upper social class tends to watch short films due to the themes and content involved in short films. Social issues such as politics and conflicts are sometimes addressed,which the lower class are not drawn towards as much. The demographics of an audience can be categorised into particular brands due to their jobs and statuses.

Psychographics

There are a certain types of audiences that are targeted within short films, these include:

Succeeders - This group involves people who are driven by their income and want to get further up within the film industry. If these people have already become successful in the industry, they are the ones to decide whether they want to invest in a new director. They would be the type of audience to watch short films and bring more income into their company. Succeeders tend to be film enthusiasts that could be visiting film festivals and looking for talented filmmakers.

Aspirers - These type of people could be the younger generation, such as students who have just left college or university searching for a job and hoping to make it into the film industry. This group of people are driven by their motivation and dreaming of a better living, which results in them watching films to research and understand the short film industry. This allows them to gain inspiration for their own film and it could eventually get them recognised within this industry.

Individualists - This sector of within the audience includes people who aim to express their attitudes and opinions through their films. They can often identify with smaller topics that could be the theme of a short film. They aren't like the mainstreamers who are the audience for larger, bigger-budget films as they are seen as independent thinkers, which want to be separate from the crowds.

My Target Audience

From my research into the target audience within short films we have decided that our film should be aimed towards the age group between 15-30. We have chosen to target our film towards this category because our main character ‘Edward’ is of a younger age group in his teens and this would allow the audience to relate to him and certain situations within the film. Our film could be targeted towards the male sector due to our main character being of the male gender himself and it could appeal to the boys more personally. Our film is targeted towards all types of social classes due to the issues raised within the film and our characters are from completely different backgrounds throughout. This could also teach the audience to go against certain stereotypes of people as our film provides a range of different people from particular classes. The demographics of our film could be categorised as code E, which includes unemployed, students and casual workers. This is due to the fact our target audience is mainly young people between the ages of 15-30 years old. The psychographics that my target audience could fit into could be all three categories succeeders, aspirers and individualists. This is due to how we distribute our film through social media, film festivals and competitions. To achieve a successful target audience we will upload our film onto various social media sites, which will allow people we know to share it and this will hopefully gain a wider audience. Also, we are thinking of setting up a film showing of our short film to the students within our school, which will allow them to give us feedback and comments on how we could have improved.