Planning: Target Audience Feedback

Before moving any further forwards with our ideas, we felt that it was necessary to consult with members of our target audience in order to get their opinions about our film.

This was a stage that we felt to be vital as we wanted to ensure that our idea was one that appealed to the demographic to whom we were targeting our film.

There were various ways that we could have conducted this audience research, including video and audio interviews or paper questionnaires. However, we decided that the use of a web-based survey, such as those provided by Survey Monkey, would be the best option for us as it would allow us to share the survey with a wider sample of our target audience. This is because our audience is more used with technology and social media allowing us share our survey easily, for example the people that took part in the survey were reached by using Facebook to inform them.

We chose that our target audience would be teens and above, so the ages between 12 to 20 because we felt it would be most suitable for our initials ideas of a horror movie opening.

We created an online survey on Survey Monkey which allowed us to send to everyone easily. When choosing the questions our aim was the receive information that would give an idea of how our horror movie should start.

We first asked the audience what age group they were in to make us better understand what ages tend to watch horror movies more and we found that people aged 15 to 19 watch horror movies more with the outlier of people ages 20 and above.

We then asked the audience if they were a fan of horror movies to see if it was a popular genre, from this questionnaire we had found that 4 out of 5 people that participated agreed that they enjoyed horror films with the exception of the 1 that did said they do not.

Moreover we added our 60 second pitch to the question and asked them if they thought that someone should end up dying in the opening, we then discovered that 60 percent of our audience agreed they would expect someone to die in the opening and 40 percent said no one should die in the opening. This gave us a better understanding of seeing the target audiences expectations towards horror openings, although we took this information into consideration we still decided that no one will die in the opening for a more suspensive start to the movie.

Lastly we specifically asked for 5 people that were either young men or women to answer our final question,this is so we can get a true opinion on how you movie should start, this would valuable to use as it fits our target audience and make the movie appeal more to the age group. after receiving the feedback we took the 2nd and 3rd comments and implemented into our own script/treatment as we found the idea of a danger behind closed doors very fitting for our pitch, on the other hand we thought 1st comment would show too much of the movie and speed up the opening exploiting too much, although the last 2 comments were very good but we thought we wouldn't be able to fit into our 2 minute opening.