Group: Audience Research

Methodology

To test out some of our idea and build apon our target audience, we created a survey on the website Survey Monkey. The main purpose was to see if the ideas that we had established fitted with that of the expectations of our target audience of 15-21. To make the results valid we sent the survey out to a sample of 45 people via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter; of these 45 people, all of them responded which was very useful. The main type of question we used were multiple choice questions, as although it allowed the participants to give any answer they wished, it meant we could integrate our own ideas and see if they were selected. 

Here is the link to our survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZZ6DWFV

Results

• The above two questions provided an indicator as to how we should look at the results to follow; a mixed gender audience based largely between 15-21 which, is the core audience we aim to establish in our opening.

• This fairly simple question allowed us to see whether our core audience actually watched thriller movies, let alone enjoyed them; answers laid heaviest between "Often" and "Now-and-Then", we aim to make the thriller genre more popular, therefore the fact that people do actually watch thriller makes this a bit easier. 

• In the above question we learned that our ideas turned out to be very popular with our key demographic; for each category, the top two selections include our ideas. The fact that those who partook in the survey agree with our idea means that any doubt we had been having about them have been more or less eliminated. 

• This question has given us a basis for a script / storyline; in that, it has given us an idea of how far to take the opening and how to write it, especially to incorporate the most popular option of involvement with the audience.                                                                                                            
  

• The most popular colours, as shown above, are compliant to our ideas about how we wanted our opening to look; featuring mainly blacks, reds and greys, we want our piece to incorporate a film noir, traditional thriller look, with the audience perhaps not being able to see all of the shot adding to the mystery created.

Evaluation

After taking a detailed look at all our responses and how our initial ideas appealed to our target audience; we feel that our concept and individual aspects of the film that we favoured are also ones that our target audience favour. Furthermore, some of the answers, especially in the 'When Watching..' quesiton, have given us a way of effectively developing a script to suit our opening as before we were struggling with ways of making the whole thing sound not only believable, but suitable for our crime thriller genre. Ultimately, this process has been very useful and we now feel that we can move on with confidence.