Potential Poster / Magazine Photos

We took these shots at the airsoft centre as we felt we already had access to the uniforms and there was also the right background, which could save us a lot of time later. However, as you can see, this was towards the end of the day and the light was not as good as it had been earlier.

The background for this shots has potential to work well on the poster as the location is quite non-specific but has the right military feel.

Here we moved away from the all to improve the lighting, but the background is not as effective.

We are also conscious that in the posters we researched, the facial expressions of the cast were key for conveying the mood and emotion of the film. This is something we will have to work on!

Photos from Filming

 

 

Target Audience - Brendon

Overview of Theory

There are many different factors that have to be considered when identifying the target audience for your product. In this case the product is a movie, and the main factors the company will have to take into account when choosing their target audience lies within what is included in their movie. Violence, emotional drama and tension are the main themes within our movie and therefore we would base our target audience on those who these factors appeal to. The traditional and almost outdated way of choosing or identifying a target audience would be to use the demographic approach which sets out age groups for the target audience, relying on the fact that people in that age group will all like the content within the movie. Our demographic would be 15 to 35 year olds which coincides with the key demographic of 18-34 year olds. The demographic system also takes in to account gender alongside the age group selection, with this knowledge of the demographic system our movie actually is non-gender specific and would appeal to all genders within our demographic age group.

The theorist Ang stated that this way of choosing a target audience is outdated and not relevant in current times as audiences consist of individuals with individual tastes rather than an overall taste for an age group. The new system he proposed was the VALs system (values, attitude and lifestyles). This system narrows down audiences into certain age groups and genders as well as peoples personal tastes which make the system more reliable to production companies and those deciding who the movie will appeal to. With this system in mind our key factors such as the violence, emotional drama and the tension we used the VAL system to more accurately decide on our target audience.

Another theorist named Fiske actually contradicted both of the previous systems and stated a particularly radical theory that there are in fact no audiences that exist. The reason he says this is that everyone in the world is an individual and therefore will have completely different tastes and individual likes as there is so much choice that will cater to their taste. We could not follow this theorist’s way of thinking as we needed to choose a target audience for our movie and therefore chose a system that would be more reliable and include more variables and data, the VALs system.

Two theorists named Blumer and Katz classified the audience by saying that they seek movies for two things, the first of these is just people who “use” the movie just for entertainment or to escape life and their problems. The second thing audience will look for is “gratification”, these audiences will use movies for self worth if others are having worse problems than them in the movie or for social bonding with others after the movie. We hope our film will provide some of these uses and gratifications and the trailer will hint to the audience that this will be the case. For example the fast pace and action shots should promise entertainment, while the mystery element should give people lots to talk about and therefore promote social bonding.

Another theorist called Silverstone stated that audiences are consumers. They like to be able to watch the movie and make believe that what we have seen is actually real as the movie seemed like it was a more interesting place. The second thing they want is performance from the movie, this falls into fan fiction where fans actually take themes from the movie and write or rein act there favourite scenes and add their own twists to something they prefer. A key example of this is when people make YouTube parodies of movies they have seen that are almost tributes to the real movies for others to see. We are allowing for the audience to interact with our film in an active way through our promotional campaign as we provide a strong tease element with the character posters and also through use of social networking sites where audiences can post views, interact with character profiles etc and ‘play’ by pretending these characters are real.

Our Approach

http://www.movieweb.com/movies/2012/war

This site suggests that war films are considered a good bet as there are a substantial number released each year. Therefore we can be confident that there is a target audience for our film.

http://voices.yahoo.com/the-thought-provoking-appeal-homeland-10781637.html

Our film is not only a film about war, but instead focuses on family relationships, the consequences of war and also questions whether high level military decisions are moral or not. The TV show Homeland has been a big success and deals with similar issues and has an ambiguous appeal like (hopefully) our film. Its success shows that there is a market for challenging drama where war is a part of it but is the agent of the conflict rather than driving the narrative. So I feel we can tap into an existing market who will be looking for more of this kind of drama.






 

More Poster and Magazine Cover Mock Ups

Here we looked at magazine covers featuring military style films and noticed the aggressive body language and direct gaze of the main characters. We tried to replicate this in our mocked up versions:

 

 

However the difficulty for us is that we have a character who does not want to join the army, as well as a character who is passionately devoted to it and one who is in it but is losing faith. We therefore have a lot of different attitudes to get across. We also think that the relationship between the brothers is a key theme, so we are debating whether to include the father in the shot or to leave it as the two brothers - that way it will be easier to contrast them and easier for us to carry more themes of the story without it being sominated by the military uniform.

Preparation Photos to Create Family Photo

The family photo that appears in our trailer was difficult to organise as the day we managed to borrow the uniforms, we could not get the whole cast together at the same time due to the teaching commitments of two of our cast members. So we had to take individual shots and create a family photo on Photoshop:

Target Audience - George

Research into target audience and how to attract them

Target audiences are an important part of any promotional campaign. What is a little different for us from the real media world is that we need to research two things at once: what is the target audience that products of the kind we are making seem to be aimed at and what we can do to attract this audience. In the real media world, I suspect that the main attention and research goes into the second of these tasks, and I also imagine that a great deal of attention is paid to attracting new and unexpected audiences to increase profits.

In order to research target audience, I am going to look at some theories around this and then look more practically at my film.

Theorists such as Fiske state that target audiences no longer exist and everybody has an individual liking – so we have audiences rather than an audience. So I need to think about a wider appeal that might catch many different kinds of people. By doing this I will also be able to provide the audience with more choice when it comes to watching a film and seeing a trailer. This in general is a more active audience approach.

Another way I could target my audience is by taking a demographic approach. For my trailer/proposed film the target audience is around 15-35 years of age. This is contained well within the key demographic boundary of 18-34 as this gives film the best potential to succeed as this is the age group associated with the most disposable income and leisure time. This is a very broad audience which means the trailer may appeal to a variety of ages within this boundary giving the trailer/proposed film greater potential. Research into my target audience also provides evidence that my trailer is non-gender specific which again widens the prospect of appealing to a greater audience.

However, this demographic approach may not be sufficient in order to help my promotional campaign succeed. Theorists such as Ang state that it is harder these days as  age, class and gender divsions close to use demographics in order to identify a target audience and this method is old-fashioned so instead I may have to use the VALs approach which looks into values, attitudes and lifestyle of the potential audience. The attitudes of my target audience may be of fear of  war as a lot of our trailer/proposed film is focused on a war situation. Many of the values held by our audience may be similar to the attitudes and their lifestyle may be similar to one that is present in the film (violence/tension at home). Or it may be a direct contrast to their lifestyle and they may be curious to see the direct opposite.

Other theorists state that when considering target audience we should forget about the demographic and VALs approach to targeting an audience and look at the audience as a ‘user’ Theorists such as Blumer and Katz state that we should look into the Uses and Gratification of an audience. Many audiences may choose to see a film because of entertainment value so we must seek to show a good balance of emotion and include opposing genre factors e.g. comedy v drama. By doing this we can provide the greatest amount of entertainment possible. Many audience individuals also enjoy the fact that a film can provide escapism. Escapism is when a film can entice you so much that you forget almost everything that is going on around them. To achieve this we must look to provide many enticing factors in our promotional campaign so out trailer/proposed film can provide this sense on escapism that much of the audience seek. Audiences also seem to like the factor of self-worth. This is the situation where a film/text can cause the audience member to feel better about their own life and situation. We can achieve this by including really gritty and hard-hitting emotional factors within our promotional campaign. Social bonding is also a vital factor that may help our promotional campaign succeed. This is when a film has plenty of talking points and can help people socialise to a certain extent. To do this we must look to include certain degrees of controversy and tension so that people have plenty to talk about throughout the promotional campaign and with the proposed film if it was to be released. Using social networking sites as part of the campaign will also help with this. The theorist Silverstone also stated that many of us consume films just for the enjoyment factor of seeing something new so by including lots of enjoyable and enticing factors we will be able to make the consumption of the film satisfactory. A lot of audiences also like to believe the world of the text/movie is true, or in other words, the audience ‘plays’ with the text/movie. Fan fiction is a common outcome of this and by supplying lots of background information within my promotional campaign, audiences may be able to begin writing items such as fan fiction before the film is even released. By making our trailer memorable, people may also be more enticed into attempting to make spoof and parody trailers. By doing this our promotional campaign and proposed film can achieve more publicity and actively engage the audience.

So,  in theory, we can say that our intended film should attract quite a healthy audience. At the same time, I think I think I have shown that while some genres have quite an easily defined audience (chick flick for example), ours is not so easy and we have to think more carefully about who might watch our film.

These two articles both investigate why people like war films:

http://jainismus.hubpages.com/hub/Why-People-Like-War-Movies

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/may/15/gender.world

They contradict each other a little - one suggests it's all about the action, and the other that it's less about brutal scenes than about a process of identification - working out what you would do in the situation. Interestingly, the guardian piece implies a largely male audience, as you might expect for a war film, although it is obviously written quite light-heartedly. Overall, I think audiences expect action scenes and scenes of danger and tension in war films and would be disappointed if they didn't see them, but I agree that a lot of the appeal is about projection.

This blogger compares The Pacific and Band of Brothers to identify what kind of appeal war films have to women:

http://allaboutwarmovies.com/2010/09/13/do-women-prefer-the-pacific-to-band-of-brothers/

This and the following comments are interesting. Of course, our film is not totally a war film because it compares two brothers, one who actively hates the military life chosen by his father and brother, and there is also a lot of anti-military feel. We think this and the strong family storyline might appeal to women, and this blog and the comments suggest this is a valid approach, even thought it might feel a bit stereotypical in its approach. It is also true that there are often not many female characters in war films so the process of identification described above is not so easy. We have the mother character in our film and we imagine the younger brother would also have a girlfriend.

Initial Poster Ideas

We mocked up some possible poster ideas on Photoshop using found images to give ourselves ideas for possible poster designs.

First we looked at posters associated with war:

We noticed that these posters had a lot in common. Close ups of faces are common to show their expressions, and where there is conflict this is reflected in the way they face or are grouped. These faces often emerge from a misty background. A silhouetted soldier or group of soldiers on the horizon is another common theme, probably because this has become an iconic shot since WWI. Often these posters feature faces as the promonent feature and silhouetted action scenes in the background.

Our Ideas



This design could carry a lot of narrative - Sam's hoped for normal life at the top. a battle scene at the bottom and the faces of the main characters in a misty cloud over the top of both.

This is more of a design to suggest conflict between the two main characters. If the father was wearing uniform and the son wasn't, this would hint at the cause of the argument / tension.



This design focuses on the main character and gives a clear war theme but does not show his inner conflict.

A rough grouping of characters would attract an audience who liked the actors but again does not have a strong sense of narrative.