R + P Post 2: Our target audience

Core Audience
Our film has a core audience of the LGBTQ+ community, due to our film following a teenage closeted gay protagonist. Nearly the entirety of the community will have at one point or another been a gay teenager and know of the feelings and hardships that our protagonist must go through. Also, much of this audience will be able to associate with his feelings of entrapment, due to being a closeted gay by having once been a closeted gay too. The LGBTQ+ community are also used to having films about being gay being produced and therefore will not see it as a belittling as long as it is a genuine portrayal of what being gay is. Examples of such "true to life" gay movies include Beautiful Thing (1996) which tells the story of a misunderstood and abused gay teenager, or Weekend (2011) which tells a love story about one man falling in love with another following a one night stand and the difficulties that follow.

Bloc Party's Keke Okereke

This audience are stereotypically interested in the arts, such as music and drama and often are big supporters of independent music artists and cinema, such as the film Beautiful Thing (1996) or the band Bloc Party with their gay front man and song writer Kele Okereke, who is known to include gay themes within their music. Therefore, the British indie film production values of our film would make the film more attractive to our target audience. This could also be attributed to the association that indie films are often more about satisfying a nicher audience, such as the LGBTQ+ community, by tailoring directly to them through authenticity and narrative rather than trying to make as much profit as possible.

Wider Markets
However, our film will have wider secondary and tertiary audiences, for example:

• British teenagers
• Bildungsroman genre fans

British teenagers may be persuaded to come and see the film, because in the end of the day, it is about another British teenager dealing with everything that life throws at him and the struggles he must go through to over come it all. This means that although the character is gay, his story would really be relatable to any teenager, however British teenagers are likely to find it far more relatable, due to accents, settings and humour present in the story. The younger generations (15-31 years old) have also typically been far more tolerant of those with different beliefs and sexuality to them, so it is more likely for an adult of the 55+ years old demographic to object to the film based on it having a gay protagonist.

Oliver Tate's comical coming of age in
Submarine (2010)

Secondly, fans of the "Coming of Age" or bildungsroman genre are likely to enjoy the film, due to the film being a part of this feel-good film genre. The personal development of the character as he begins to overcome his fear of being discriminated against, due to his sexuality leads to him coming out of the closet to show his love for another man. These kinds of personal developments are also a common theme in bildungsroman films, with much of the humour coming from such moments in the film, which would make the film appeal to this wider audience.