Intentions (NEW)

We are going to create our own programme and 3 paged website, which has a target audience of 15-35 years, with the same demographics and psychographics as the E4 audience, while being suitable for a pre-watershed showing. We as a group have decided to create a fictional production, within the genre of a Situation Comedy, by making sure we follow the codes and conventions presented in E4 sitcoms and websites. These codes and conventions consist of narrative, camera angles, stereotypes, mise en scene, representation and genre. E4's demographic audience is represented in its logo. By having their logo in purple, suggests that the institution is targeting both male and females, and along with the bubbly style font, creating a light hearted, young effect. I feel that this then emphasises its younger audience as their shows are seen to be more funny and light hearted (mainly sitcoms) compared to Channel 4.

By completing my audience research I have found that my target audience is based at 15-30 year olds, both male and female from looking at both the viewing figures and ratings on IMBD for both The Inbetweeners and The IT Crowd. Therefore as both these two programmes are Situation Comedies we took these figures to influence our decision on creating our target audience. Also, by looking at the Social Networking Fan Pages for both these Sitcoms, we have found that the audience seem to be quite encouraged, about the narratives, characters and the comedy of the shows. This then suggested to us that we should look into the what the audience like about their favourite sitcoms and what they would like to be included in our own.

       When targeting our age bracket of 15-30 we must pay attention to the class system as it can impact on the way we target our audience. We then therefore intend to target 15-30 year olds in the social classes of B,C1.C2 and D ranging from high middle class to lower working class, due to being the social classes in which E4 aim their programmes at. Due to our programme being set in a state college in the middle of Camden Town and the characters being in this class range, we are then meeting those social classes, which will cause the audience to relate to the characters and situations more realistically.

By creating our own situation comedy, we decided to complete primary research into our audience to find out what their favourite situation comedies were. As we only asked people in our demographic range of 15-30 we received results that would be helpful into creating our show based on what the audience enjoy. By then analysing the most popular "sitcoms" we then had a range of genre codes and conventions that we would have to use in our show. One of the main conventions was a serious narrative made funny, so we then asked our target audience which situations they would prefer than others. From these results we then decided to create a college based "sitcom" that would present all of the embarrassing school memories that everyone in our demographic has gone through, causing the show to be relatable. Also, my getting the target audience to choose some of our characters and to state what they like and dislike about Situation Comedies, we can create a sitcom that hopefully reaches what the audience want. One of these characters was the "geek", as in our primary audience research with both a survey and focus group the character of the "geek" was seen most popular. This may have been linked to the Inbetweeners character of "Will" as the show was also seen as the most popular sitcom in our research. Therefore, due to our research the narrative will be based around a "geek"character as college experiencing all of those embarrassing memories in which the audience can relate to.

Furthermore, when creating our website we used the E4 website as our main inspiration as their shows all share the same 15-35 aged demographic as we were given on our design brief. Also, as in our audience research on other E4 situation comedies we found that both male and females watch the shows, which was then reinforced in our surveys as our audience stated that they wanted a mixed gender cast. Due to having a mixed gender target audience we have decided to create a website that would suit both audiences and therefore, will have green as our main colour scheme as it can represent both genders. Green also connotates with being light hearted and humorous, which then could represent that the audience will feel humor and escapism when watching the show.  Also, by having our show based around college life, we have decided to have green as the college's main colour. Also, we will incorporate a street/graffiti theme to our website to give it a young and urban sense of style. This idea will then be presented in our fonts and images used like on the E4 website. When analysing the E4 website we found the conventions used were character pages, with photos of each character, information on the character and a quote that they would say, along with interviews with the cast on their lives and language suited to the 15-30 demographic age. Due to having E4 as our main institution, we are going to incorporate these conventions into our website. For exmaple, on the Inbetweeners webpage, they have created their character page and then link a further page to each character to give further information, we will then include this convention on our own website to make sure we attract the same demographic. Our website will be quite a fun page, which will create lively atmosphere for young people, while creating the sense of a school/college life and the situations that you come across in teenage years. 

Overall, I intend to create a 2 minute clip and a 3 paged website based on our Situation Comedy aimed at both men and women aged between 15-30. I will follow the codes and conventions shown in popular E4 sitcoms and will apply then to my clip, to create a successful, exciting and humorous new sitcom. My website will also contain the typical codes and conventions used on the E4 sites, which will then help attract the same demographic with a bold, vibrant and interactive website.