Reseacrh and Planning: Age Certificate and Target Audience

'Subsidence' has an age certificate of '15'. The reason we labelled this film a '15' was due to the content of the film not being particularly gory, or explicit but the major theme being drugs which means it can only be referred to by older teenagers that this age bracket applies to. Also, the film is very mature and the film certificate needed to relate to a teenagers life, specifically the maturer age of teenage years, hence the '15' certificate. There is also death in the film, and can therefore be categorised into the 15 age bracket- due to the sheer brutality and and cruelty of the death (although not really seen or emphasised in the trailer). According to the BBFC, 15 certificated movies can include violence, and no limit on bad words or actions. They cannot promote drug misuse, which is opposite to our intention, which was the deciding factor in grading the film a certificate. Our negative promotion of drugs complies with the certificate needs awarded buy the BBFC.


In terms of defining the target audience, we used a technique that is shortened to G.R.A.S.S.
This stands for Genre/ Race/Age/ Socio-Economic Status.

Genre- Subsidence can apply to both male and female. This is due to the story following two characters, both a boy and girl. Therefore a male can enjoy the physical side to the film and the females can enjoy the love related story to the film.

Race- Subsidence is a film opened to all races, from different ethnic minorities as they can still relate their lives to those in the film, and gain an insight into social realism as a whole.

Age- Focusing on areas of the film, we decided that the age range of 15- 25 was an age range that would be most likely to watch this film, due to the fact 15 year olds can compare the film to their current life and compare events, and the older age of the bracket can refer to how life used to be in their childhood or teenage years.

Socio-Economic- Status- Working class will be the social status that this film will be generally aimed at, however those from the middle class may find the film to be an interesting insight into how other people live their lives. So, in terms of status, we remained fairly open as the characters each have different class status.