Target Audience Research and Feedback.

There was many reasons as to why we felt it was essential to undergo audience research before going anywhere with our project. Firstly, we were put into groups where we all had different ideas as to what our film could be, so instead of battling between us what our film should include, it made sense to find out what our audience would find scary in the bid to make an interesting trailer. Another thing we wanted to find out was who our audience actually was - Gender? Age? Lifestyle? All these things I feel would effect our trailer in the sense that, some people may not be interesting in going to the cinema, some people may not be of the age where they enjoy the cinema, and another main reason is that we wanted to find out how many of our audience were males (Seeing as in our film we planned on having a final girl, and therefore we had to allow our audience, both genders, to assosicate with her). Surveymonkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/) was our best bet at a quick, easy way to collect research about our audience and to find out how to progress with our trailer. Surveymonkey is a website that allows you to set up questionnaires online for free, whether they be closed questions, multiple choice, or open ended questions where our audience could write an answer. We chose to have multiple choice questions because we thought it gave our audience the freedom to pick from various answers, because we felt that if we had allowed them to write an answer to each question it would have given them too much freedom and it would have been difficult to collect our data. We had 10 questions which began with finding out about the person, and went on to find out about their habits when it comes to films (who they go to the cinema with, etc), and towards the end the questionnaire was more specially on horror. We advertised our questionnaire on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/) because it was a quick and easy way to advertise our questionnaire to our friends as well as mutual friends - however we did initially think this may cause an issue when it came to our question on age because it was almost clear that all the people taking our questionnaire would be the same age as us, seeing as they were using the same social networking sites as us.

When we collected our data we found some interesting responses and some responses just as we imagined. As we expected, most of our audience fell into the 15-18 category (52.9%), with the second biggest percentage of people being 19-24. Although it was quite close with our gender question, we did establish that more of our audience was male (58.8%), which is something that we need to keep in mind throughout planning as we need to entice our audience into our film as well as making them associate with our final girl (When exploring Carol Clovers theory in my blog I discovered that although horror is mainly aimed at males, it does make them associate with women). We also found that most of our audience would watch a film with a group of people (70.6%), and if not that then with their partner (41.9%), with only 5.9% saying they would watch a film alone. 50% of people also said this would probably be a DVD at home whereas only 31.3% of people would actually venture out to the cinema - something that we must remember when we think towards a distribution plan - Trailers at the cinema obviously isn't enough to target our whole audience (especially when we found that 94.1% of our audience want to see a film because of the trailer, and 88.2% of people would see a film more so because of the clips in the trailer than the stars of the film). Although we already knew as a group we wanted to put a twist on religious iconography, making our film a religious horror, our findings also found that 70.6% of people found psychological films scary too - which is something we plan on taking on board when thinking towards our plot and our storyboards. We also found that less people found handheld cameras gave a less scary effect than we imagined as a group - After looking at the trailer for Paranormal Activity previously in my blog I personally find that using a handheld camera makes it feel a lot scarier and more, real, so even though our audience research has said that our audience has said otherwise we may still carry through with this idea but not as extreme as we may have. We also found that when it came to 'weapons', no one found guns scary and a very small percent (17.6%) found knives scary - but torture devices and chainsaws were found to be most scary both getting (58.8%).

Our audience research has helped us a lot to, not only discover who our audience is, but what they like in horror and what they find interesting about a trailer. Many things we've learnt from our audience research we plan on carrying through, such as the plot line, etc, whereas some things we have thought we may not include for various (for example - although we found that a lot of people found chainsaws scary, using one would be hard work to look good and wouldn't really fit with our plot line). We have also learnt a lot about the individuals who took our questionnaire such as their gender, age and habits when it comes to watching films - all things that will come in handy when thinking about our promotional package as a whole. Although I found surveymonkey was a good, easy way to collect data, I do now wish we had gone a little more indepth with our questionnaire, asking a few more questions or offering a few more answers on the multiple choice questions so that we could pinpoint a lot more about our audience and their interests then we already know. However, now our audience research is done and we've discovered a lot of things about our audience we didn't know, we can now mould our film around that as well as having the freedom to create something unique and interesting with our own individual twist.