Research: Audience Theories

Audience theory’s

With the creation of the Internet and sights such as You tube making it more accessible for audiences to find movie trailers and share, the trailers with other people across the world. Audiences increasingly seek out trailers, with them not passively consuming them but actively pursuing them trough sites such as You tube.

Audiences use trailers-                

• To make choices about seeing a film
• To prepare  them selves for the movie experience of the cinema and have some understanding of the narrative and genre of the film they are going to watch.
• As a stand alone form of entertainment or even a distraction from everyday life, that can be used as a pass time and also be used as a form of recreation.

 Two step Flow Theory- Paul Lazarsfeld

The two step flow theory suggests that ideas flow from mass media to opinion leaders, which them share these ideas widely increasingly through social media such as Twitter and Facebook to a wider population (eg the Share button on Facebook.) This theory can be applied to our own production as we used social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to gather Professional opinion from other people, and people who are indirectly affected by the trailer through those opinion leaders. Globalisation increase due to these sights allows people to instantly access that trailer from anywhere in the world at any given time.

Uses and Gratifications theory

This theory is primarily focused on the consumer, this suggests that the audience affects the media through their own interpretation of the media its self. Trailers have varying uses and gratifications which the audience activity seeks. Within our own production their a are key uses and gratifications that the audience activity seeks:

Diversion- as escape from everyday pressures such as work and school, and I chance to release those pressures through the media.  

Surveillance- audiences activity seeking information on current affairs and gather information on the world outside their own. Trailer convey messages through codes and conventions about current affairs, trends and what happening in the world around us. Our trailer fits within the theory as diversion is more commonly seek ed by our audience as a way of relaxing and escaping from life’s pressures for a moment. 

Personal relationships- using the media for emotional or other social interaction, such as substituting trailers or soap operas for real life. 

Personal Identity- using media to find and reflect yourself within the media text. And learning from these texts and changing your behaviour.