Audience

With short films being such a niche target audience In general it is quite difficult to define a target audience for my short film alone. With most short films gaining audiences through word of mouth and on specialist Internet sites such as the BBC Film Network and Youtube, or entering their films into Film Festivals such as the Rushes Soho Short Film Festival, I originally targeted my piece at males and females aged between 17 and 24. These people are most likely to be at University and studying so this would be most effective for them. Having to change the idea of my short film meant having to change the target audience. I decided to go for a wider audience, but of course with the nature of the film, it is targeted at people that are looking for somewhere to go with their family during the summer, and I believe my video is a perfect example of this.

It does this by giving a solid narration about activities and the history of Portsmouth, which after looking at my influences, is the key to a good promotional video.

To gain more feedback, I created a ten-question questionnaire to hand out to people that I know. I did this by sending emails and sending a link to the Youtube Channel of BDC and asked people to watch and answer the questions. This was very useful as it provided a non-bias viewpoint of somebody that was watching it for the first time. It was important that I included a wide range of questions including what people liked about it, whether they knew anything about Portsmouth before, whether it would make them want to visit and what would they want to see.

One positive comment that came from most viewers was that they believed the piece was very informative and enlightened them to what Portsmouth is about. Three of the ten questionnaires said that the establishing shots of the water lapping upon the shore made them even want to go to Portsmouth in the summer. This was what I aimed to achieve.

A criticism and improvement that could be made to it was to include some interviews, at least one with perhaps a tourist attraction manager. It was felt by my audience that this would have added more ‘weight’ to the piece making it more like a documentary.

Thanks to this audience feedback, it has made me realise that my video piece has been quite successful in what I aimed to achieve, but as expected doesn’t quite fit the Documentary criteria.