The primary audience for our film was aimed at adults, as the genre typically follows that. We tried to show this off during the voice over using older language and slang than that of what a typical teenager would use, vocabulary such as 'Shindig' and 'hoity-toity' this is language that an older audience would be much more familiar with this vocabulary. Also most films that are aimed at teenagers that are made today usually are made for an audience with little attention spans, films such as Michael Bay directed films or most modern horror films such as Ouija where there is a jump scare every 15 minutes. I wanted to make our film dialogue heavy so it would attract a more adult audience. However this is also a downfall the film, as a key part of the film is not heard due to background noise which, when we did test runs caused confusion. However when we showed our film to a teenage audience, most didn't follow the plot until a second viewing however when shown to an adult audience they understood the plot on the first viewing, this leads me to believe that we achieved our goal of trying to make it for an adult audience.
However if this type of film was to be shown in cinemas it would have less of a fighting chance than say a horror film as the cinema is usually shown as mainly being a teenage hobby so for example, if a group of teenagers went to the cinema, the vast majority would be able to see a 15 rated horror rather than a more adult film. Another reason for this isn't just age, films that are story heavy are better seen in lower numbered groups as cinema for teenagers is more of a social thing so if they all go see a horror film they don't have to concentrate as much and can talk to their friends without upsetting people or miss any 'good' parts of the film.
Teenagers are considered to be the main consumers of cinema. Media institutions try to advertise their film to teenagers by certain key conventions that most teenage-films have. For example the first one is usually a young cast, and mostly attractive. The male gaze theory by Laura Mulvey plays an important part when targeting these young audiences, they usually add a young attractive female to lure in the male audience. However with film genres that are popular amongst teenagers it usually doesn't matter as most institutions know that teenagers will go see horror films, especially around Halloween time, no matter if they're good or bad (see Ouija, Annabelle).
For our target audience however things may be done a little differently, institutions may still use the male gaze idea but as the adult audience is much less prominent in cinema studios may try to push films to be rated 15 rather than 18 as they know 18 is a risk and they may not make as much money. An example of this is Dredd (2012) the director pushed the studios to allow it to be an 18 rated due to it's comic book origin which is gritty and violent, however this would be their hubris as Dredd did very poorly in the box office and many suspect that this was because of the age rating restricting younger audiences to go see it, and older audiences thinking that it was just another generic comic book film. So for our film we didn't want anything like that, we wanted it to have the gritty style like Dredd, but not the public generalizing about its genre, another film that was a neo-noir but also verged on super heroism is Sin City due to its Comic Book/Graphic Novel origins, so we tried to stay away from that style/genre all together and targeted the audiences of classic films such as Roman Polanksi's Chinatown or David Lynch's Wild at Heart.
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| This was our primary audience target, this is the YouGov audience profile for people who liked the film China Town. If our product was being produced by a studio, we would have to expand the borders on the genre and make it more modern so it would pick up a greater audience. |
Finally the way our film represents these social groups we have been talking about is different for each character. The femme fatale is shown as frail and weak, however the last shot shows that she's more than meets the eye showing a modern take on women in our society, that they aren't weak or feeble. This is a common character characteristic in films, more so in modern films. It's a trait we wanted to keep because it's vital to the conventions of film noir, as well as it reflects what society is like today.
The detective in our film noir represents police in a good light, showing that the police are hard working and determined, no matter what the situation is. In the recent years the police have been all over the spotlight with riots such as the Birmingham riots or the Ferguson riots. There has been countless reports on the police officers who have died trying to stop them or have been seriously injured. I feel that our Detective, with his opening narration reflects how the police are in today's society whilst still keeping with the codes and conventions of film noir. I feel that it still has the classic look, and characteristics such as the language and the smoking but he talks about how determined he is to get the 'bad guy' no matter who that is, he just wants justice. Although this is not every police officer everywhere, as it's just a stereotye, however it is how the media presents them whether it's in news reports as mentioned above or other films such as Don Siegel's Dirty Harry or John Mctiernan's Die Hard.
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