Audience Research - Questionnaire Analysis

When conducting our research, our goal was to find out what our target market - aged 15+ - take into consideration when choosing a film to watch. We asked over 20 people in order to shape our judgement as to what is necessary to make a popular film. Here are some of our results:




We asked the question, "Which of these would be most effective in making you want to watch a Thriller?" We decided to ask this question in order to see what we needed to focus on when creating our film's opening sequence. As you can see, the majority said "Narrative," which helped us realise that we needed to devote ourselves to making the storyline work well, rather than finding the right cast or anything else. Both individuals who answered "Other" said that the most effective way to make them watch a Thriller was the levels of scariness, in that the film had to produce high levels of trepidation.





We also asked the question, "Sometimes, viewers may begin to watch a movie but then stop. Which of the following make you want to continue watching a movie the most?" As you can see, more than half of the people asked said that they are most likely to continue watching because of its narrative, and the close second was the opening sequence. This, therefore means that we are more likely to get the widest possible audience by focusing on the opening sequence and the narrative.








One of our other questions was, "How are you most likely to hear about a movie" so that we could know where to advertise our film the majority of the time. As you can see, 75% of the individuals said that they are most likely to hear about a film via "TV", "Adverts on another movie", or the "Internet." We found that this was a beneficial question to ask, because it helps us pinpoint where we would profit the most when promoting our movie; where to promote the film so that our widest target audience can access and learn about it. For the percentage which answered "Other," 2 answered by saying, "posters on buses and bus stops" and the other answered by saying, "newspaper adverts," which further helped us understand where the majority of our target audience find out about films.



We also found out that most of the participants in this research enjoy the comedy and romantic genres more than thrillers, however, a large ground of these individuals enjoy thrillers as well, therefore this shows that we are targeting the correct audience. However, because we are trying to create a psychological thriller which has characteristics relating to this genre, it will be difficult to include aspects of these other genres, thus we are focusing on the thriller genre. Moreover, we also found out that there was a split in the answer to the question, "Do you like an ambiguous and implicit storyline, rather that an overt and explicit one?" where the results were nearly completely the same for both answers - 60% of people enjoy an ambiguous storyline, whereas 40% enjoy an explicit one, which diferentiates from what we previously thought was true; that a higher amount (if not all) of our target market would enjoy an implicit storyline.

Start of our production

In order to help with the preliminary task and the main task, we have been watching and analyzing a variety of different thrillers, including 'Memento,' 'Pacific Heights,' 'Vertigo,' 'Rope' and 'The Usual Suspects.' We watched these pictures to get an understanding of the conventions of the Thriller genre from different points in time from different producers' perspectives. The conventions soon became apparent, as did the personal styles of each producer and/or director. We were then given the task of shooting the preliminary task, which was: Someone opens the door, walks across a room, sits down in a chair opposite another character and exchanges two sentences of conversation. To begin, we created a storyboard comprising of three shots. The purpose of the storyboard was to give us a clear idea of what we need to do. We then started preparing to film, i.e. getting actresses and creating the setting, and were pleased when we got it done in two lessons. The first day of shooting, we had difficulties with our organisation, such as forgetting the battery, however, we managed to shoot enough scenes to make up half of our preliminary task, therefore learning from our mistakes. We eventually made the preliminary task and edited it accordingly. This wasn't easy, especially in a group of three people in terms of organisation. We didn't use a tripod because our selected camera didn't have one, so we had to test our skills manually. It proved challenging and the picture was shaky but after a lot of preparation we managed to stabilise the picture as much as possible. We also tested our manual skills when focusing the lense, but we still realised that the task would have been a lot easier with a better-equipped camera.