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Audience Research
On the 5th of November we had a class discussion regarding how our groups should approach conducting audience research. We decided as a group to split in half to produce two diffrent questionnaire. We choose the research method of questionnaire because we throught that it was a fast, easy and convenient method of collecting our audiences opinions. We produced a questionnaire with a mixure of open and closed answers, and another questionnaire that we would use as a guide in an interview process.
This is our questionnaire that myself and Lorna produced to use during the interview processes. We decided to use these types of questions as we are able to use the audiences responces to help to make our film opening more apealing to them.
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The Results:
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Interview process:
Above is the questionnaire that Phoebe and Olivia created to ask 18 randomly selected volunteers. We decided to disperse the questioners to random volunteers as it would give us an idea about what our audience would expect as not a stratified group may give us a false idea as to what they expect a thriller to be like.
Our first question asked how old the volunteer was as we wanted to get an idea about our target audience likes. As you can see most of the questioners were completed by under 18 year olds which is in the middle of our range of our target audience, this helped us to understand our audiences interests and ideas in order to apply it to our film opening. Similarly with the second question we were able to see a range of interests from both genders which made our research more reliable as we were able to see what connotations appealed to all of our target audience and not just one gender of it. The third question allowed us to see if our sub-genre would be attractive to the target audience. As you can see over 1/3 of the people asked picked the sub-genre that our group wanted to focus on. This meant that our target audience would be interested in watching our film opening as the sub-genre appealed to over 1/3 of them.
Question 4 allowed us as a group to think about the actual camera work, editing, mise en scene and sound that we would use in our film opening. This is because over half of our target audience preferred a rated 18 thriller film. This meant that we were going to have to think of ways we could cater to this, for example, use more disturbing use of sounds and editing. This is because rated 18 films tend to be more intense and more disturbing for the audience. On fifth question 100% of the volunteers voted that a male should be used as an antagonist. As a group we decided that this is what we were going to do with our antagonist, we felt that males are stereotypically used as the antagonist and we wanted our audience to be interested in watching it. We felt that if we used a woman our audience would have less interest in our film as they are portrayed in thrillers as weak. On the sixth question we wanted to establish where the setting of our filming would take place. On the questionnaire we used two options that are stereotypical for thriller film settings, the other question was the setting we had ideas about using. About 2/3 of the volunteers also chose our idea of setting. We wanted to go away from stereotypical settings as we felt it would be different and original. Because our target audience agreed with us we have decided to set our film in a house and abandoned underground building, this is because we felt that using a normal house would make our protagonist more relatable which would make the audience feel more uncomfortable as they can sympathise with the protagonists.
Question seven allowed us to see what our target audience wanted in terms of narrative within the opening. We decided as a group that we didn’t want to use much narrative at all in our opening we thought that the opening should leave the audience questioning the scene and leave them on a ‘cliff hanger’. On question eight, we were able to see what our target audience wanted in terms of provoked emotion. The most voted questions consisted of: fear, suspense and tension. These emotions we would like to provoke on our audience, but we also want to create the feeling of disturbance within the audience. We feel like because we are aiming for a rated 18 film opening we should include some disturbing feelings. This would also help to make our film different from the other thriller films where tension is the main focus of emotion.
We conducted interviews on the 20th of November 2015. During
the interview process we were able to gather verbal feedback from
people within our Target audience. We asked eight people of both
genders to answer our questions. Olivia in our group asked the
questions, Phoebe recorded the answers and I edited them together.
We asked questions that would help us to understand what our
audience wanted and were interested in, so that we could successfully
create a film opening that would be appealing to them.
Our second question was ‘why do you like thrillers?’ This question
allowed us to discover the elements of thrillers that we could use to
entice the audience into watching our finished film. The top answers
to this question were the suspense, adrenaline and the twists and
turns. Within our opening we have decided to use suspense and
tension. Because our film is only an opening, we feel that if we use
twists within the first 2 minutes it would seem more like a trailer than
film opening. Question 3 was similar in asking ‘what makes a thriller
appeal to you?’ one of the answers was the mystery. We have decided to use this idea of incorporating mystery as we feel it creates tension as the audience do not know what will happen. We have chosen to create mystery by including characters without names and cross cuts to confuse the audience. Our 4th question addresses the antagonist within our film opening. We asked ‘what’s your favourite kind of villain?’ and the response ranged from ‘young’ to ‘old’ and ‘disability’ to ‘dramatic’. Because of these contradicting views, we chose to make our villain dehumanised (have no identity). This way it doesn’t make our film look like a trailer and it makes the antagonist more daunting. The 5th question asked what makes the character relatable. We were able to understand and see what makes the audience relate to the characters. The majority of the interviewees said that the age of the characters makes them relatable. We have taken this idea and view to make our characters younger around the age of 17-18, this is because the audience would be able to relate more to the characters as they become realistic. The last question we asked was the favourite element of thriller. The participants answered various answers. Some of them said camera work and some said the sound in the film, because of these answers we need to make sure our film opening has good camera using a range of shots as well as correct use of sound.
