PRE-PRODUCTION; CHOOSING A DEMOGRAPHIC

Part of my role as a Producer on Unspoken, I need to make sure we know exactly what platform we are looking at for the film as well as our exact target audience. Firstly, I thought I would do some more research to look into audience categorisations so I know exactly who we should be aiming for.
-Defining a target audience is about the returns you want to get from a piece of work
-Focus on establishing a clear empathy with the audience that you want to serve, this way you know what the audience are feeling and the work that you do within a project is trying to evoke these feelings.
-Have a theme and try to express this through your audience, it must be a theme that appeals to them.

Those are the main points I think link well with my choosing of the audience for Unspoken, found from the Independent Film Office articles. Unspoken is a film that touches upon two main themes, mens mental health and trauma. We would want to focus on young people aged 16-30 as our primary audience, the males watching our film will relate with the character of Marlo and the issues he is facing and well as resonating with his fear of speaking to people about his issues. As I have previously discussed in my research, men are using mental health services far less than women, and male suicide is at an all time high because of mental health issues. The females within this age bracket will be targeted through the narrative of future plans and educational decisions, a time in a young persons life can be stressful when they have to decide their future plans. Marlo is not only struggling with his grieving and mental health, he is being pressured into making decisions about his university choices when he doesn't want too and everything his getting on top of him, the females within our audience will be able to resonate with this as well.  A secondary audience will be parents, Julie is a character that is crying out to help her son. Every scene Julie spends being worried about Marlo and she tries her best to get him to speak to her. This is something all parents will be able to relate too, the idea of needing and wanting to help their child, and so I believe that parents will also be a good secondary audience for us.