Question 4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

Anglia Square car park (Location of our thriller) 

London council estate

Transit, our thriller opening, aims at a young male audience aged between 16-25 years old. To begin with, location in our thriller is used to show a specific demographic within our target audience. For example our location lacks the qualities of a pleasant environment, creating a very dim and gritty atmosphere. This location is a lot similar to council estates across the UK, like the image found in London. The scenery of where our thriller is set is rundown and dirty. The location reflects the behavior associated with people who live in council estates, they are stereotyped to have a negative reputation for anti-social behavior; such as violence. This links to the type of action and characters which would be featured in our thriller opening, due to the reputation this type of setting has. Across the UK approximately 30% of people live in council housing, we can expect a large number of these would be included within our demographic because they can relate to the setting and possibly the situations. This makes 'Transit' appealing to those who live in council housing.

Characters from 'Top Boy'

Secondly, the characters within our media product help establish who the target audience is. The characters John is between the aimed age range. Following this, John is a 17 year old male part of an ethnic minority who is identified to be wearing mainly black clothing. His clothing is a lot similar to the clothing seen in the TV drama 'Top Boy' where the colour black is manly worn because of its shady representation, John is also seen with his hood up which may be because he is trying to hide his identity making him have this intimidating feel. The audience is widened because of John being from an ethnic minority, there will be varied races and not just from the majority being Caucasian. John can be understood to being viewed as several types of characters which can relate to the target audience.

Our demographic of 16-25 year old males would most likely enjoy films with a similar setting or a gritty atmosphere. Films and TV dramas such as 'Kidulthood' and 'Top Boy' feature a similar setting to our thriller opening as well as ethnic minority characters. On the IMDB user ratings for 'Kidulthood', males under 18 gave this film the highest ratings because they can relate to the characters, the main reason how they can relate to the characters is because of the age they are. The film follows a group of troubled 15 year-olds growing up in west London. Also another way in which the males under 18 could relate to the film is by the location of the film, being west-London. Many of the raters would be from London and other big cities which are similar to London in setting. Also 'Kidulthood' includes a variety of races, the majority being black and white meaning that it would be popular between both these races.

'Kidulthood' poster showing a mixture of both black and white youths

With Top Boy, the majority of voters were males and the highest ratings were 'males under 18' and 'Aged under 18', which again similar to 'Kidulthood' a lot of people can relate to the location. If the user rating had a section with race, then I would say that 'Top Boy' would be more popular among black and white people. 'Top Boy' follows mainly black characters among gang culture making it more popular with blacks because they can relate to the race of the majority of characters. There are around 1,088,600 black British people in Greater London, however the black population forms around 3.3% of the UK's population (2011 statistics) this is why 'Top Boy' would be popular among both blacks and whites.