Audience Theories

Hypodermic Needle Theory

This is when audiences don't need to pay that much attention, or engage their brain, to understand the film, instead, the information is just fed to them.




The Uses and Gratification Theory

This is where audiences want to feel something from a film. These audiences will select a particular film because they want to learn something from it.

How will this apply to our film?

We will apply these theories in our films by firstly understanding what it is the audience wants to get from our film by doing genre research prior to making our opening scene. Once we understand what it is they want we will use the hypodermic needle theory to feed the information into the audiences. By doing this they will then want to watch the rest of the film because although they may not have been engaged, where the information was fed into them they are now intrigued about what is going to happen next and therefore want to see more. We will use the Uses and Gratifications theory by using stereotypical conventions of which you would expect to find from Crime/Dramas, this will then mean our target audience, who want to see these typical conventions will watch our film opening, notice the typical conventions that they'd expect, which will make them want to see the rest of the film. They will want to watch more as this is what they expected and what they wanted to see.