Evaluation Activity - Extended Task - Audience Theory

    It is fairly clear to understand that all pices of media text is produced with an audience in mind. This is the same for us as well. We produced our trailer with an audience in mind. This audience was predominantly working/middle class males. There are a number of theories regarding audince that I will now look at in this post in regards to out media texts.

   The first theory is the hyperdermic needle theory. This suggests that a media text injects its ideas, values and attitudes straight into a passive audience.

    This is why we decided our trailer to be a 15 age certificate.The reason for this is that we felt some of the topics that would have been covered if we were to produce a film would be too explict for a age group under the age of 15. Obviously, the trailer was less explict as a younger audience would be able to watch it on T.V without getting any negative ideas of aggression and violence.
    I felt that we also injected positive ideas towards the audience of someone chasing their dream. Thus why I felt that our trailer had much more of a positive feel taken out from it by the audience as opposed to the neagtive aspect of aggression.


Another theory could be the reception theory. This suggests that the text is not accepted passively by the audience. But the individual audience members interpretation of the text depends on their own cultural experiences.
 
   The stereotype associated with the working class of being aggressive could mean that our trailer feeds nagative information to the audiemnce. Despite this, I believe that our trailer is very much supported by the hyperdermic needle theory much more and thus the reasdon why we chose the age certificate of 15.

 A third theory could be the uses and gratifactions theory which consists of 5 reasons why audiences consume media texts. These are:

• To be Informed and Educated.
• In order to identify with characters and situation
• To be entertained
• To enable themselves to socially interact with others
• Escapism from their daily troubles and woes

A number of these reasons apply to us as well. For instance, the need to be entertained is one of the main reasons why audiences watch movies and thus we tried to make the audience entertained in the trailer through the music and quick cut in shots. That high intensity will build the audiences adreneline which would be a sign of them being entertained.

Anoother reason why they would watch our trailer is due to escapism.Our trailer is very different to a story that you would see in real life and thus will most probably provide escapism tothe majority of the audience.