Film audiences: targeting, positioning and reception

Overview

What is meant by targeting an audience for a film, four-quadrant film and how a film positions its audience.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Explain what is meant by targeting an audience for a film.

   Model answer

   Targeting is designing and promoting a film for a defined group, identified by age, gender, taste, existing fandom and previous viewing.

2. 2

   What is a four-quadrant film?

   Model answer

   A four-quadrant film is one designed to appeal to men and women both over and under twenty-five, and therefore to the widest possible audience.

3. 3

   Explain how an age certificate affects the audience a film can reach.

   Model answer

   A certificate sets the legal minimum age of the audience, so a lower category admits families and teenagers while a higher one excludes a large part of the potential market.

4. 4

   Explain how a film positions its audience.

   Model answer

   Through point-of-view shots, alignment with a protagonist, music and the withholding of information, a film decides what the audience know, whom they are asked to sympathise with and from where they watch.

5. 5

   Apply Hall's reception theory to a feature film.

   Model answer

   A viewer who accepts the film's values and reads its ending as intended takes the preferred reading, one who enjoys the film but rejects part of its argument makes a negotiated reading, and one who reads it against its own values makes an oppositional reading.

6. 6

   Give one reason two viewers respond very differently to the same film.

   Model answer

   Viewers bring different experience, cultural knowledge and expectations, so one scene can be frightening, absurd or moving depending on who is watching.

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