Audience Research 1 & 2

Audience Research - Task 1 

As a group we decided that we are going to be carrying out a questionnaire for our research into what people would like to see in a Thriller opening sequence and what our audience would expect to see.Me and my group have decided to chose a thriller as our opening sequence, we are aiming that our target audience will be around the ages 16-24, as this is what most thrillers are rated as. We wanted to find out more information about the target audience. To do this me and my group worked on making a questionnaire which was 10 questions long. The questionnaire that we made was to give us more detail into what kinds of people like to watch thriller genres and to see if there was any link between the films they like to watch and the results we gained. We made 30 copies of out questionnaire, so the members of the group would each have 10 to hand out. The fact that we have 30 questionnaires filled out gives us a wide range of responses to the questions we asked, they were both a mixture of male and female. This was done so that we didn't get biased answers. 

Here is examples of the questionnaire that me and my group made, I am showing you the two pages so you can see all the questions. Through doing my questions I found out that most people like to watch horrors as it creates tension, this was common through all of mine and my groups results it was a common feature. Also I found out in the mis-en-scene questions, the audience would like it to be a dark setting, this is what me and my group have chosen to incorporate into our opening sequence, because a dark sinister place such as an abandoned warehouse would create a atmosphere which the audience have said they would like too see within our groups opening sequence. However another interesting thing me and my group found, most of the people who answered our questionnaires chose the lead role to be the same gender as them, however not all did.

Below you can see our overall results put into pie charts, we chose the three most important questions, and I put the results into a pie chart.

This is the second question on the questionaire, we tried to keep it as equal as we could, however you can see that there is slightly more females than males, this could make it bias however it is unlikely that the following questions. 

This was out sixth question on the questionnaire, you can see that there is a equal answer, this is showing that  people don't mind where the movie comes from, as some people may not know if they are watching a British film or not.

From this we can see that most people like to go to the cinema to watch movies as this was chosen to be the most popular, we can then see that DVD is the second important, this is interesting because the people who liked going to the cinema had action or thriller as their chosen genre, this is a correlation that we see through my groups questionnaires. 

From this chart we can see most of the people we asked often watch movies, this means that if we were producing a real film, people are more likely to watch it, also from our results we see that no one chose never, because are target audience is age 16-24 it shows that they all watch movies at some point. Around 60% chose often in our groups questionaires. 

This question was for the benefit of what we could include in our groups opening sequence, we found that Low key lighting was the most chosen option (which is dark lighting) this feature is popular within many opening sequences of Thriller films. The props that were chosen were mainly weapons which are things such as knifes and guns however, we aren't aloud to use these props in the opening sequence that me and my group are going to make. An interesting result that we found out was the dark costumes one, because people told us that they seem mysterious and gives you a sense of curiosity with who the characters are.

Overall I think from the questionnaire that me and my group carried out, we are going to include dark lighting this is a because we want the audience to feel on edge, also it was the most popular feature of mis- en -scene chosen by the people who took the questionnaire, so we have decided to include this in our opening. We also decided that we will have a slow paced soundtrack because we as well as the target audience think that it would fit the genre of thriller well because it is building tension and creating a mysterious atmosphere which is a convention of a thriller opening. We then discussed if a thriller opening has a specific target audience, we believe that thrillers aren't commonly aimed at females or males, so we have decided to keep our thriller opening sequence so that it appeals to both females and males.