Audience Profile

In order to be able to create a relevant and useful audience profile to be used on our second film, I analysed the IMDB page for the crime thriller 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'. I feel as though this will be a suitable film to inspire ours as it features many conventions of thrillers yet is a little more unusual than most with one of the two protagonists being something of a social pariah. I would like to explore having an unconventional protagonist on our next film in the same way that 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' does, so it could also prove to be a useful piece of reference material.

It has received a rating of 7.9 out of 10 from 234,135 users. As the graph below indicates, significantly more males had rated this film than females: 167869 to 46762 at the time. More specifically, the age bracket that had most rated this film was 18-29, which could prove to be useful in conducting our audience research as we now know roughly which age demographic 

                                   

These things considered, I interviewed my Dad about thriller films. From this I learnt what his favourite thriller films are, what he likes about them and why, what he expects from a thriller soundtrack and what his perceptions of a thriller protagonist and antagonist are. I also interviewed my classmate Matt, who at 17 is almost within the most popular age bracket of viewers for 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', so his opinions would be useful to take into consideration when producing our film. Lastly, I interviewed our teacher Ms. Moore, who I thought would be useful in providing a professional opinion on what to expect from thriller films. Also included is an interview Joel did with his Dad, and interviews Connor did with his parents:

After conferring with the other members of the group, we all came to the decision that the most appropriate target audience for our production will be males over the age of 18 (we will not aim exclusively at men, however, they were just the gender with whom thrillers proved to be most popular when we were doing our research). We came to this decision through each analysing statistics for a different film on 'imdb.com'. As mentioned, I researched 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', Joel researched 'Goodfellas' and Connor researched 'Now You See Me'. We chose these three as we felt that they are as different as films could possibly be within the 'crime thriller' subgenre, and so would provide a varied set of results. imdb.com allows one to view a visual representation of which age demographic a certain film is most popular with (as seen above), and for each of the three films we researched, it was a male group over the age of 18; this is why we have elected to choose this age demographic.

A Scanner Darkly

For the first part of our 'A Level Film Enrichment', I borrowed 'A Scanner Darkly' (Richard Linklater, 2006). Simply put, it's a near future sci-fi film about a group of friends addicted to the mysterious drug 'Substance D', focusing heavily on the theme of identity. 

The film is stunning visually, employing a 'rotoscoping' technique which animates the actors in a very realistic manner. However, there's no glaringly obvious reason for this; it just seems as if Linklater thought it looked cool and couldn't think of a reason not to. In places, it can make understanding some of the characters quite tricky (talking quickly, as paranoid drug addicts do) as it's very hard to lip-read them.

A still from 'A Scanner Darkly', demonstrating the 'rotoscoping' technique

Having said that, I thought 'A Scanner Darkly' was a totally engaging film - the philosophical and thought provoking is balanced perfectly with the comical and quotable. Not one of its 100 minutes felt wasted, and while the plot is slightly tricky to understand instantly, the viewer will be left trying to piece the plot together for the rest of the day, and if a film can have as much of an effect on a viewer as to make them want to figure it all out, then in my eyes it's been a success. 

8/10