Deciding our audience beforehand

How did we decide our target audience ?

Before we decided our audience, the three of us sat and made a check list for choosing the right audience.
1. Who are the viewers we will be addressing?

• Girls and Boys 

2. What age group?

• 15 - 25

3. Are they male, female, or both?

• Both

4. What educational background?

• They all go to English medium schools, have information about sports, they must all see sports in their school.

5. What socioeconomic status?

• Teenagers who come from Lower-middle class to upper-higher class.

6. What values, prejudices, assumptions do they have about life?

• (To have a larger audience we decided that) They can be mentally healthy and happy people, depressed, courageous, ambitious, the film can be watched by people who like sports and play some kind of sport and the people who do not.

7. Where do our viewers stand on the issue we are showing about?

• They can be positive, negative or have no idea about sports or the problems that girls face while playing a sport. The film is not that technical based.

8. Do they know anything about it?

• They should know something at least. Most of the teenagers do know what squash is.

9. If so, how might they have learned about it?

• Through media, school, someone in the family, social circle etc.

10. Is there anything we have in common with our viewers on the issue?

• Our viewers are going to be of our age group, hence we understand what people of our age group go through in our society especially girls. We are enthusiastic about making a film on a girl who plays squash in a country like Pakistan, we think our viewers would be enthusiastic too since a game like Squash has never been brought up before in any film industry on large scale.

11. How do we want our viewers to view the issue?

• We want them to view it positively as we want the film to encourage people towards squash positively.

12. If they are hostile to our view, can we persuade them to see the issue our way?

• Yes we can, through an excellent direction and storyline.

Recci shots

 Below are the shots of the location of the home of our main character and of squash court where she and the coach will be practicing squash

Squash court

Main Protagonist's Dressing table

 

Main Protagonist's Bedroom

We plan on visiting more locations and taking more pictures

Response we recieved from a second set of questionnaires

Below are the responses we received from our second questionnaire particularly focusing on the choice of movies watched by our audience.

The age group of the respondents

The gender of the respondents.

Media House

Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc. (SPE) is the television and film production/distribution unit of Japanese multinational technology and media conglomerate Sony. Its group sales in 2010 has been reported to be of $7.2 billion.

One of the holding of sony entertainment group is Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group With a library of more than 4,000 films as of 2004 this unit of Sony distributes about 22 films a year under its various studio brands in 67 countries. The group owns studio facilities in the United States, Hong Kong, Madrid, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Japan. In addition to the below company-owned brands, Columbia TriStar also has a contract to distribute films for independent Revolution Studios and select films by MGM and United Artists.

Columbia Pictures, Tristar pictures, Sony pictures India, Sony Pictures Classics , Screen gems, Truimph Films, Sony pictures home entertainment and etc.

Screen Gems is an American movie production company and subsidiary company of Sony Picture Entertainment's Columbia Tristar Motion Picture Group that has served several different purposes for its parent companies over the decades since its incorporation.

On September 16, 2002, Columbia TriStar Television became Sony Pictures Television, while three years earlier, in 1999, Screen Gems was resurrected as a fourth specialty film producing arm of Sony's Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, after Sony Pictures Classics, Triumph Films and Destination Films. Screen Gems produces and releases "films that fall between the wide-release movies traditionally developed and distributed by Columbia Pictures and those released by Sony Pictures Classics." Many of its releases are of the horror, thriller, action, comedy and urban genres, making the unit similar to Dimension Films (part of The Weinstein Company), Hollywood Pictures (part of the Walt Disney Company), and Rogue Pictures (currently owned by Relativity Media, but distributed by former owners Universal Studios).
The most-successful Screen Gems film commercially as of November 2010 was Resident Evil: Afterlife, which grossed $296,221,566 in international box office receipts.

Screen Gems

• Screen Gems focuses on films that fall between the wide-release movies traditionally developed and distributed by Columbia Pictures and those released by Sony Pictures Classics
• Recent releases include: Friends with Benefits and Straw Dogs
• Upcoming releases include: Underworld Awakening and The Vow

source: http://www.sonypictures.com/corp/corporatefact.html#sg

Why screen gems?

The reason we chose screen gems to distribute our movies are because:

Screen gems has made and distributed several movies similar to the codes and conventions we are following in our movies. mainly slashers distributed by screen gems have female victims stalked by psychotic stalkers (antagonist). For example movies such as 'When a stranger calls' by Simon west, the protagonist a female shown clueless at first but then faces the dilemma and at the end takes down the antagonist by either killing him or sending him to jail.

Screen gems has mostly been profitable in distributing mainstream horror suspense films. Our movie is also mainstream and movies distributed by screen gems with similar codes and conventions have grossed approximately far more than the invested money for example the cost in prom night was 20 million while the revenue generated was 57 million

with screen gems as our distributor we can reach to our designated audience as the movies made by screen gems are usually targeted towards adolescents and adults in in the age group of 20-35 years who like to watch horror/slasher

movies made by screen gems represent everyday problems along with uncommon but potentially captivating conflicts For example, the Lakeview Terrace by Neil LaBute shows an abusive officer terrorizing his neighbors who are inter racially married. Another example 'In the Cut' directed by Jane Campion focuses on a college English professor (Ryan) who becomes entangled with a detective (Ruffalo) investigating a series of gruesome murders in her Manhattan neighborhood.

Screen gems is an ideal media house for us as screen gems is very much likely to purchase and distribute our movies and most of the movies to the audience we want to represent and have targeted.

The basic questions of audience research

 While researching we came across a website which included many helpful guidelines to conduct an audience research. at the end of the web-page we found a couple of questions and we though we should answer them to evaluate ho much we know about our audience. Some questions we may have not answered. 

1. How large is the audience - both as an average, and as the reach (number of different people)?

Since our move is main stream therefore we are targeting mass audience mainly including teenagers and adolescents for our movie

2. What kind of people make up the audience? How do they differ from the whole population - e.g. in terms of age group, sex, occupation, etc?

Our audience for the survey was made up of students between the age group of 15-30. There were more girls than boys. There were very few people in the age group of 20-30 who were teachers.

3. Where is your audience? In each part of your coverage area, what percentage of the population are members of your audience?

We have targeted teenagers in Pakistan and the survey we conducted was in our school where 80% of our target audience is found. Our potential watchers will be in such schools and homes in Pakistan

6. What type of content (e.g. radio and TV programs, newspaper articles) interests your audience most - and least?

The audience wanted something different and witty and they did not want to see any stereotypical theme of distress and problems like those shown in many teenage movie

7. What styles of presentation do your audience prefer, and what styles do they dislike?

Our audience preferred more attention grabbing graphics, music and different varienty of shots. They wanted a trailer that was more fast paced.

8. Which activities, attitudes, and other effects do your publications cause among your audience?

Our previous movie made in AS gave a positive response from the audience as it also represented a teenager. However it was thought to be more slow paced and dull.

9. How will your audience react to a new kind of program or article that you might introduce?

Our audience showed a positive response to the survey we conducted and also in the focus group, they liked the trailers of the similar genre as our movie shown to them.

Problems and challenges faced by teenages

Before finalizing any storyline we first want to know our target audience well. Hence we are first researching on how our target audience is like and what are their preferences on watching a certain movie.

We distributed questionnaires to the A level students from Beacon house, who anonymously them. Although not everyone added more detail about the problems they faced, they however did at least specify the type of a problem. Furthermore while surfing on the internet, I found a couple of blogs that talked about teenage problems and challenges. The URL mentioned below is a website on teen adviser and they have short listed the most basic and common problems young adolescent face

http://www.teensadvisor.com/teen-problems.html

There is another website called www.at-risk org. They presented facts and statistic on depression faced by teenagers. In our questionnaire we saw that depression is a common problem amongst girls

http://www.at-risk.org/blog/916/statistics-and-fact-about-teen-depression-2/

I also found a couple of interesting pie chart's from a blog that showed how the thoughts of old and young females differ

Questionnaire on problems faced by teenagers.

Before Deciding on any proper story or Genre, we decided to first conduct a survey on the problems faced by teenagers so that we can realistically represent and portray Pakistani teenagers on our teaser. We distributed many questionnaires and below are some of the responses we received. Some however were shy and were not exactly specifying the problems they faced on that particular area. 

 

Below are the Responses we recieved.

 Most of the problems teenagers faced were related to studies. This questionnaire was distributed amongst A-level students and they found studies at this age,  more pressurizing. Second came relationship issues. There is quite a difference in the answers received on depression by males and females. Females suffered with depression most.