Post 9A: Research Into Your Target Audience

The Demographic of Short Film Audiences
The demographic characteristics of an audience include things such as:
Age
    
Gender





Ethnicity and Race

Economic status



and many others. http://wps.ablongman.com/ab_public_speaking_2/24/6223/1593259.cw/index.html


The Psychographic of Short Film Audiences
There are many types of psychographics in short film audiences.

One type is the Achiever. The Achiever is roughly around 5-7% of the whole population. A typical type of Acheiver is a serious business person who constantly is searching to become better and build what they have around them. A common word to describe an Achiever would be 'workaholic'. As an audience, Achievers like to be drawn in quickly and not waste time, they want individuality and are interested in power and money.



A second type of psychographic is the Balanced type. This group is the smallest of them all and accounts for around 1-2% of the whole population. It is a mixture between the Achiever group and the Socially Conscious groups. They are Achievers with a Social Conscience, not so selfish. The balanced group is split into two subgroups, the repentant sinner and the true philantropist. The repentant sinner needs goals to be met and a solution must be achieved. To them, making a profit is not a main issue, therefore when looking at films, they will not be searching for big Hollywood Blockbusters and may be more settled with a short film.
On the other hand, a true philantropist will usually do research around the film they are interested in seeing and then decide from there whether they actually want to go ahead and watch it or not. This is why it is important for us to think about and include websites in our postcards for our audiences to be able to research around it and read more into what it is about.


Short Film Distribution Methods
When Hollywood films distirbute their films they have a wide variety of methods in which they can use. Their target audience will be so diverse that they can use methods such as film trailers, posters, billboards, bus displays and some even create toys, for example Toy Story worked together with McDonalds and sold Toy Story toys with Happy Meals in order for the young children to see the toys and then want to see the film. 

However, for short film it is a lot harder to reach the audience you want. Short films are less talked about and less advertised around and so hearing about short films is a lot harder. Short film producers don't use methods such as billboards or trailers, as their films are a lot shorter, they don't include A list celebrity actors and they don't normally have a huge budget like the Hollywood films would.
Short films use postcards instead of posters. Postcards still give out similar information to what you find on a film poster but it is a more simpler, cheaper method for short films. As short films are more low key, the target audience becomes harder to approach.

This is an example of a short film postcard.



Where Hollywood films would use the cinema to promote new films, short films need to use other methods such as the internet or short film festivals to promote new and upcoming short films. Short film festivals are a great place for distributing new short films as the people who attend these festivals have knowledge and interest in short films and so will be more interested in what new short films are coming out rather than those in cinemas. 

Short Film Festivals

There are many short film festivals in which producers go along and promote their new short films, some to get distributors to help them distribute and market their film and others just to get promotion and audience. Other main film festivals have short film categories in which short films have the opportunity to win awards and promote their films further. 

One short film festival is Encounters International Film Festival.

http://www.encounters-festival.org.uk/

This is a short film festival which takes place during September and allows short film makers to attend and to show their new creations. 

Another film festival is the Sundance Film Festival.

http://www.sundance.org/festival/

This film festival has various categories, including one for short films. 

In the following article: 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/21/DD5KST9SF.DTL

It talks about ways of distributing short films.

it says. 'Creators of short films (40 minutes or less) have finally found an audience through such online sites as iTunes, Revver.com and San Francisco's Frameline Films and Caachi.com, which specializes in distributing independent films. And those sites are even starting to bring a revenue trickle to older shorts that audiences are unearthing online.'

This shows that the internet plays a very big part when distributing short films. 

It also shows that although short films may have a harder time to distribute their films to their target audiences, it doesn't stop them creating them. 

'This year 5,088 short films were submitted to the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, up from 4,445 last year'.