AUDIENCE
With great considerations and discussions on our idea and the audience, we came to the conclusion that our target audience will be:
- Young teenagers from the ages 16-25
- Both female and male
- Sci-fi/mystery thriller fans
- Use social media platforms
This is because in this day and age, smartphones and tablets are a major factor in the success to the marketing when releasing a new TV series or online series. For example- The Vampire Dairies, Once Upon a Time, The Game of Thrones, all these are major examples of successful TV Drama series all targeting a similar audience. The reason for this is because teenagers who are always on the go tend to use their smartphones/tablets to watch their drama series and TV programmes because of there busy schedules they don’t have the time to watch it on TV to catch up, therefore this element of TV programmes using social media within transmedia is to reach out to their target audience such as Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, YouTube etc. as this attracts the attention of their specific teenage target audience as all teenagers have smartphones and at least one of these social media platforms to read the latest about their favourite TV programme.
Because of our genre of thriller/mystery we feel that the culture of our audience is more westernised then anything, this is because similar drama series as mentioned above most of the big fan base is based in countries such as USA and the UK, so we felt that using mobile to create our content was perfect because of the concept of Vine and YouTube has become so popular in these countries the likelihood that we will target our audience through our concept and execution of social media should be successful.
We feel that because of our target audience who are young and expose themselves to content created online that we will have people in our target audience who will be Passive and Shares, the reason for this is because our main focus is audience involvement and engagement we want them to participate and join the quest. we will have the passive audience who will watch our YouTube teasers/trailers, Vine and Instagram Posts, read updates etc, which is necessary when it comes to the spreadability of our content when looking at views and likes. on the other hand the shares will help raise more awareness of our transmedia campaign, what we are doing and what is expected because the shares do no only watch our videos they will re-tweet, share, comment and like which will help our campaign. Plus because our target audience are young teenagers most of them are shares because of the fact our videos are short yet mysterious this will allure our audience into sharing our content with friends and ends up as a discussion which is normally how things go wide spread and viral. Therefore definitely suiting our narrative because their curiosity will enhance user engagement and participation because our genre is so popular with young fans and because our narrative is enigmas based this will drive our audience and start them off in the quest on…. WHO REALLY KILLED PATRICK?
NARRATIVE
In our Transmedia project we want to narrate a “who did it” theme YouTube one season series, about a group of friends that go to a forest to see the eclipse but it doesn’t turn out the way they expected it to as a death emerges. We want to narrate a mystery yet exciting narrative which is full of plot twists, this is because we want our audience to be involved in the idea of a quest to find the answer to their enigma’s on who killed Patrick? Why did they kill him? etc. The narrative is going to be based on the catalyst which is Patrick’s Death where the narrative will be told using flashbacks; back-story and foreshadowing where all these techniques will be present throughout the programme it will go through a flashback of each character and their story until the last episode where the killer will be revealed. The genre of our narrative is a mystery/thriller drama.
There will be 5 main characters, Tom (clever one), Patrick (the leader), Luke (the wimp), Suzie (the blonde), Beth (the aggressive/over confident one) some of the most typical characters in a thriller drama, we chose these character types as we are sure the audience will relate and identify the characters straight away. They all relate to each other because they are a group of friends that go to Salford City College together.
Tom
Had an abusive childhood but always goes to the library to learn and get away from all the drama but ever since his new roommate Patrick joined the college Tom found a friend in him but secretly hated him as he got all the girls.
Patrick
The cool new guy that joined the college from getting kicked out from another college and everyone loves him and wanted to be like him but has a deep dark secret.
Suzie
She gets through life on her looks and that’s the most important thing to her but because of Patrick’s wrong doings towards her best friend Beth she wants revenge.
Beth
The pretty bully but really has soft spot but tries to hard it as she has experienced pain in the past and only confides in Suzie her best friend. But everything changed once Patrick came in the picture.
Luke
Luke is Tom’s best friend but has never really stepped out his comfort zone and fears social interactions and avoids females.
The story happens when a trip to see the solar eclipse goes wrong as the 5 characters go a separate way , where they end up in an eerie forest, but when the group hears Suzie’s scream the quest to find out who killed Patrick starts from here.
The structure of our programme will start off with the catalyst incident of Patrick’s Death and everyone somehow appears to be a suspect on Patrick’s sudden death. Where the narrative will then be driven by a big flashback on how they all met and how everything is linked telling the story of each individual and their back-story on how they are all suspects revealing who really killed Patrick at the end of the series.
TRAILER
EXPERIENCE
The type of transmedia experience we want our audience to live is suspense and curiosity, so they attempt to work out who killed Patrick by engaging through social media platforms which has little hints throughout the vines and trailers showing how each character is an essential suspect when it comes to the death of Patrick. We want our audience to feel as if they are solving the mystery with us by looking through our little hints throughout the social networking platforms like our vine videos, Instagram videos/pictures, tweets via twitter etc. This is because user involvement and engagement is an important factor when it comes to marketing a series like this, so if the user feels as if they are involved then this will create a buzz over our mysterious story, helping us with our media flow and analytics.
The engagement we wanted to create was through social media via hashtags, when posting vines, FB status, Instagram posts etc, and this engagement will influence the narrative itself because this will create a split in our target audience views and enigmas into their opinions and reasons to who killed Patrick. Almost creating a feud in the fandom on who they think killed Patrick and why. This is involving audience opinions in a positive way because the more they talk about it the more our content for Eclipse will spread which will result in engagement from many people who also follow a specific person who is retweeting our tweets, sharing our videos, revining on vine and liking all our videos, images and posts. So the more engagement from the fans the more exclusive behind the scenes we posted on Instagram to offer a sense of exclusivity to the fandom.
The way we are managing our engagement is via our hashtags #eclipserseries #whokilledpatrick and also IFTTT where you create recipes to monitor the spread of our media, for example getting an email every time someone likes our Instagram post, or retweets our tweet etc.
The users do not have much control over our story but they are involved to some extent when it comes to their reasons to why they think Patrick was killed and which of the four characters killed him The user experience will be limited to digital on these social platforms online because we don’t have the experience, knowledge and spenditure to transport this in real life
SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS & ANALYTICS
As you can see most of our content was viewed on a Mobile Web/Iphone, so 60.7% of our audience were using there mobile phones to view our content which supports our view we stated when discussing our target audience. So more than half view content on their mobile phones, which highly suggests that Smartphones are the main platforms to watch content, therefore the idea of using social media platforms for our transmedia campaign was surely correct. We used 5 major platforms to showcase our story to our audience, these were Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram and YouTube. We knew that using these platforms will be successful to target our audience as at least one teenager has 1 or 2 of these social networking profiles, so sharing our images and videos on any of these will make it seem more personal and the audience will feel more engaged to keep looking back at one the profiles for any new updates.
Analytics
To measure if our media is flowing and is spreading we used many websites and tools to find out if our work is being viewed and creating a small buzz, we used the following:
- Keyhole
- Topsy
- IFTTT
- Google Trends
we used Topsy and Google trends every time we posted something on any of the social media sites to establish any re-tweets or shares which we got, so the more shares, likes and views we got the more things we would post to the lead up of the main trailer/teaser, which is why hash tags were extremely important to measure this as this was the only way to check if users are engaging and participating in our transmedia campaign.
We mostly used Keyhole as a form of social analytic’s and trends, as shown below you can see that Instagram was the most popular social media networking site as in this current era this is the trend which is why we posted quite a lot on Instagram as 40.9% re-tweeted/ shared our content which is what we expected when we first discussed our target audience.
This is showing the number of times we posted throughout all social media platforms and our highest peak when it came to the most popular video/image posted, which suggests that our audience were participating and liking our content as we got likes and shares which was very helpful.
EXECUTION
We decided that all of our vines/trailer will be based on our set location which was a forest to set the suspense and the mood for our story. As this would immediately engage our audience on to where the actual scenes are going to take place. We first started of with introductory character vines as seen above in the narrative section, we did this because we wanted to create a friendly relationship with our audience because our target audience should automatically figure out who each character is because of the genre and the narrative proposed, therefore we thought this was an interesting idea to portray to our audience.
We did all our vines and shooting for the trailer all on one day to make it seem more realistic this is because of the same clothes to identify the character and to judge the character from the way they are dressed. We filmed everything so from vines, to our trailer on an Iphone 6 as it is portable and we wanted to create a personal yet eerie, gritty, dark effect which we did via Imovie by putting on a filter after the selfie scene to foreshadow to our target audience that from this point everything is going to go downhill with the suspense music, we wanted to make our trailer as mysterious and confusing as possible so our target audience start thinking of enigmas as we have hints throughout all of the trailer which points at every single character on the death of Patrick, we wanted to see if our audience will spot them or not and from this deliberate who killed Patrick and why?.If we had more time we would have executed more vines, little hints using images to post on Instagram and Facebook, and tweets from each character to create a strong engagement and involvement with the target audience, but overall we definitely feel that our campaign has been a success in the little space we have had to do this because it did create a buzz and people were talking about it, so we are very happy with how everything was executed.
Media Murfs 
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