Film poster target audience and Genre

The general age range for our short film is 15-20 year olds, because this is the age in which students will be involved with or thinking about university, and so will impact them more with the message. Specifically we could target students in the movie poster in the semiotic codes, but we feel could restrict or potential audience. Typically, an older audience will be turned away from an advertisement for a movie with an adolescent theme as it may be deemed "immature" or "childish".

For example, the movie poster to the right displays a smirking child with a yoyo and paint everywhere, this is generally constituted to a younger audience which wouldn't attract an older audience. But the one to the left of Elizabeth seems more professional and respectable for an adult audience.

The possibility of being able to produce multiple posters with different content which appeals to different audiences is something that has been done successfully before and is something that we should consider when coming to our production stage of the movie poster. Creating a poster with a target audience of parents with teenage children could be successful as it would show the older generation what could be happening to their child and give possible warning signals. However, to attempt this for an age group lower than the age of 15 would feel futile, as they would not understand the pressures for exams like the age group of 15-20 would, and wouldn't understand the meaning of the short film. This would be an example of an age rating not showing what the target audience is, as the short film would be rated around 12, 12 year olds generally wouldn't be in tune with the meaning of the short film.

 For example, these movie posters are all for the same film, but contain different content. They are different as the different character would appeal to different audiences and attract different people to see what their most favoured character turns out to be like. the theatrical movie poster at the end shows all of the characters together and would be used for general entertainment, whereas the character posters would oft times be found in magazines advertising the movie and rarely anywhere else.


The way in which we could approach our movie poster in terms of a comedic theme would be to have the Main character Mark, played by Daniel Enos, facing his ghost counterpart. The real Mark would be shown sharing the left half of the poster, whilst the Ghost would share the right half of the screen, like how in the split-screen within the short film, the left side will contain the realism and the right side would contain the fantasy. To show the comedy int he movie poster using these two characters, we could have Mark holding his hand over his mouth, to show the disbelief of see his counterpart, with the ghost looking smug, highlighting a possible comedic relationship between the two, highlighting the chemistry that has been written between them. Like this:

To do this effectively we will have to make almost a mirror image look about it in oder for it to genuinely look Mark and his Doppelgänger. These are things we can consider and maniuplate when it comes to building this movie poster.