Audience Research

Today me and my group created a simple questionnaire of some questions regarding short films, we handed out this questionnaire to our class as a form of audience research. From gathering our results, we have found that there was a general shared consensus on certain questions. We wanted to know that we were targeting our film at the right audience, from researching into demographics, we could infer that 16-34 year old women are our ideal market. As our class is made up of a range of 17-19 year old girls and boys we decided that our class would be an excellent representative to take our data from.

Although we initially hoped to create a radio trailer in oppose to a magazine review for one of our two ancillary tasks, 6 (two thirds) of our group would prefer a magazine review, as they understood that with thrillers they can often be difficult to understand. However, although we are not being ignorant and completely rejecting market research, we want our film to be completely ambiguous, if we created a double page spread magazine review, it would leave nothing up to audience interpretation, which was what we wanted our film to be based around.

One of the members of our target group, Emily, selected thriller as her favourite genre, and interestingly was one of the 3 in the group that wanted to see a radio trailer. We have taken Emily as the most secure guideline for some of the decision making that will take place, using audience research as a basis. Emily stated that she expected 'suspense' from a thriller, which we truly intend our film to offer. When we asked what type of characters would she like to see from a thriller film, she said 'A hidden character', which is nothing short of what our film offers. Everything is told from the stalkers perspective, he is hidden in the film for the most part, which adds to the conventional idea of suspense in a thriller.

Our audience research consolidated for us that we wanted to go ahead with our idea of a thriller as we believe it captures much of what an audience want to see. Here is some photographic evidence of the audience research we conducted: