Audience Research and evaluation

The next part of my pre-production process was to carry out audience research, in which I used two methods; a one-to-one interview and an online survey. I chose to use both methods because they have their own individual benefits in terms of feedback. With the interview, I get a far more comprehensive and personal opinion from the questions I ask, which subsquetly allows me to ask more probing questions, e.g. asking the interviewee what they thought about our group's initial storyline. The setback of an interview is that the answers given are from only one person's perspective and opinions are very much subjective and varied when asking questions like I did in the interview.

The audience research on the other hand has given me a much broader range of answers in which I can draw more conclusive results. The site I used, surveymonkey.com also created an accurate set of results based on the answers I received from each indivisual survey, collating them into a simple graph that I can evaluate more easily. The weakness of this method is that I can only ask a certain set of questions which limits the variety of answers I will receive. Also most questions I asked only required a tick in a box or a one-worded answer, unlike the interview where I received a more detailed answer.

The interview



This interview was useful because it told me that this person (Matt) found sound and editing particularly important in order to create suspense and action, elements which he drew upon from his favourite thriller movie 'Taken', an action-thriller film. It is clear from not only the interview but also the survey that many people enjoy a combination of action and psychological tension in a thriller film. This will be important when formulating the narrative for my film, as I hope to incorporate the feedback I receive. After telling the interviewee about our initial storyline, it was a positive start to receive good feedback. In particular, Matt liked the idea of including a relevant theme to the narrative being a social network because it is something that millions of people interact with on a constant basis. By exposing the darker side of social networking i.e. cyber-bullying, we have created a foundation for the narrative because it is this act of bullying which causes the protagonist to react in a psychopathic way towards his antagonist. What makes this more shocking is that although the film may be dramatised for cinematic effect, ultimately the storyline does raise real-life issues and concerns about the way we use social networking. It is no secret that cyber bullying is an ongoing issue and there have been many stories of the recipients of online abuse reacting in terrifying ways e.g suicide, violent behaviour etc. By using cyber-bullying as a central theme of the narrative, we are making it more relevant to the audience, and therefore we hope that this realism will help create a more tense and exciting atmosphere.


Online survey




































We decided as a group that we wanted 50 results as it is an even number and so easier to analyse as results. The first question we asked was whether or not the participant was male or female and this is a typical question asked in a survey in order to identify who your audience actually are. In our case, the vast majority of the audience were male and this was to be expected from a survey on thrillers; it seems males tend to enjoy this genre more than females and this may be because males tend to find action and suspense more exciting than females who generally prefer more lighted-hearted genres such as comedy or romance films. Because of these results, We acknowledge that our thriller will likely be reaching out to a more male audience, however our decision to base our film around a universal theme such as cyber-bullying and social networking means that a female audience may enjoy this film in the same way a male would.
          The second question asked was the age of participants and unfortunately I made this question open which meant a graph could not be generated from the results, so I had to manually work it out and the average age was around 16-17 years old. This was most probably because I shared the survey on Facebook so naturally most people who completed it would be a similar age to me. This was also the reason why as a group we decided to centre our initial storyline around the age of 16-17 because it is more relevant to our audience and also more realistic because most cyber-bullying affects people around this age group.

I felt that this question was important because I wanted to get a better idea of what my target audience wanted from a thriller and it was clear from these results that psychological and action thrillers are the most popular. With this in mind, when creating our storyboard will we try to incorporate a combination of both these genres using techniques used in the two types of thriller.

This was probably the most important question asked in the survey because It was an unpredictable one and prior to receiving the results I had no idea how they would turn out, whereas with the majority of the other questions I could generally predict what kind of results I would get back e.g. male and female and age. Although as a media student, I understand that all the different elements that make up a thriller are just as important as each other, I needed to gage the understanding of my audience. It is clear from these results that when watching a thriller, the elements which stand out most for them is the storyline and the feeling of suspense. The fact that camerawork only received 2 votes was the most surprising result for me because as you learn about the conventions of a thriller, you realise that camerawork is arguably the most important element when creating a film, but clearly as an average viewer it is not something that people generally pick up on because it is not something that an audience will consciously be aware of.

The final question was one that was catered towards our idea for our film specifically. We wanted to see how important it was to our audience that the theme of the film was something that they could relate to. One of the conventions of a thriller is that any object or character is represented realistically to some extent, because it is this realism that causes the audience to feel empathy and emotion towards the character. From the results, we can't really come to a definitive conclusion but we can say that it obviously plays some importance for the audience and this is helpful when creating our characters for the film because our idea is to make them relevant to the audience which will subsequently help enhance the narrative and allow us to make a more suspenseful opening.