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Audience Research

As part of our research, we came up with a series of questions and designed a survey which we then posted to our social media so we could get a better idea of what our target audience would want to see in our short 2 minute film opening. Overall, our survey was effective as it gave us a good idea of what audiences wanted in our film opening, however one downside of social media is that not everyone takes it seriously so we did encounter some inappropriate answers, however we just ignored these and continued with the serious answers which were very helpful.

To set the scene of a rough, intimidating area, we wanted a scene where the protagonist witnesses a drug deal, which would give audiences an insight into the situations and people the protagonist has to deal with. It's for this reason that we asked which environment our audience found most intimidating, and the overall response was in a dark alleyway. This is useful and means we can now plan to set our scene in a secluded alleyway or subway. It means we can start planning possible locations we can film. 

We wanted our short film opening to be engaging to our target audience, so by finding out what types of titles they would find most eye catching was really helpful, because it meant we knew we needed to include bright/colourful titles over a dark background to catch their attention.

We were unsure if we would end up  having a car scene in our short film opening, but we decided that just in case we did, we would add this question into our survey. The overall response told us that a van would be the most likely vehicle for a drug dealer to use, which meant that if we wanted to use a vehicle we would need to find a van.

We knew roughly the plot we wanted out short film to have after writing a synopsis, however, we wanted to know how our target audience would want it to finish. The results told us that the ending our target audience would prefer would be a suspenseful cliffhanger, which fits well with our original idea.

We wanted to know what time our audience would find it most realistic for a drug deal to take place and which they would find most believable and suspenseful, from the results, we found that dusk or night would be the best time to film a drug deal. Dusk does not last long and it would therefore be hard to film in as it would cause consistency errors, we would therefore choose night, however we would need a good low light quality camera if we were to film this scene.

To know what clothes we would need our actors to dress in to appear realistic to our audience, we left this as an open question as we wanted the people answering to come up with their own ideas. We had several different replies, however, the most common was trackies and a hoodie both in dark colours and perhaps be wearing some kind of expensive item, such as a nice watch to show they make money from the drug deals.

We wanted to know if the antagonist and their intentions should be clear or left mysterious and unknown, from our research, we learned that our audience would find it more intimidating if it was unknown. It is from this research that we decided our antagonist would be hooded and the audience would not see their face or know anything about them as this would create an intimidating character that can cause suspense.

Obviously, as a Thriller we wanted to create suspense and tension for the audience. The easiest and most effective way of doing this is through music and sound, we therefore wanted to see what our target audience would want to hear. from our research we learned that silence is the most effective. It is for this reason that we decided that we didn't want music through our whole film opening, at tense moments and when something of significance was happening we decided we would use silence to create tension.

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