Audience Research
As part of our research, we posted a survey to our social media to get a better idea of what our target audience would want to see in our 2 minute film opening. On the whole, the survey was helpful in giving us a good idea of what is wanted in our film opening, however we did encounter some inappropriate answers which we had to disregard as they were not serious.
During our film opening, we intend on having a short scene in which the protagonist witnesses a drug deal taking place, to give an idea that this is a regular occurrence in the area in which he lives. Because of this, we asked which environment our audience found most intimidating, and the majority responded with a dark alleyway. This helps us as we can now plan to film this scene in a subway or somewhere else secluded and dark just like an alleyway.
Next we wanted to find out how we should design the titles, as we wanted them to be appealing to the audience and catch their attention. As you can see the overwhelming winner was to have brightly-coloured titles on a dark background, as over 50% voted for this. However we must also consider the themes of our opening and ensure that it does not look out of place, so we will most likely use one bright block colour such as red, rather than multiple colours which would not fit into the theme of drug culture.
Even though we are unsure if we want to include a vehicle in our film, we thought it would be a sensible idea to find out what our audience would find the most appropriate vehicle. As you can see from our results, a van had the most votes with 34%, shortly followed by a BMW with 27%. This tells us that if we do decide to incorporate a vehicle into our film, a van is the way forward.
We asked our audience how they would like a typical drama film opening to end, whether that be with mystery, an answer or even a plot twist. Unsurprisingly almost 50% of the people we asked went with suspense, and we believed this was most suitable anyway as we don't want to give too much away as this is only the opening, and trying to fit too much into a 2 minute film would not be as successful as it could be.
We asked our audience when they would expect a drug deal to stereotypically take place, and the response we received was as expected The was a tie with 42% voting for both twilight (dusk) and and late at night, which came as no real surprise to us. Thanks to this, it helped us base the storyline around events that would be happening at effective times.
Next up, we wanted to get some feedback about the appearance of the protagonist, so we asked our audience what they would expect a teenage drug dealer to wear. A lot of the responses were suggesting hoodies and tracksuits, and a few people suggested some expensive jewellery (watches, chains etc) which we thought was a brilliant suggestion as it would show he makes a lot of money from dealing drugs. We also decided that the hoodie suggestion was an excellent idea too.
To help with the climax of our opening we asked our audience what we thought was a rather obvious questions, however the results did surprise us slightly. We didn't expect 20 of the 98 people who answered the question to say that they find the known more intimidating than the unknown. However the unknown was still the overwhelmingly popular choice. We will use this feedback to help us decide when and how to end our opening.
We needed to know whether the audience would expect to see a male or female protagonist for our short film, so we asked them which they would expect to see when taking into consideration the natures of drug culture and crime in our film. the results we received were largely in favour of a male protagonist. Using this information we know what our audience would expect to see, and we can use this to decide if we should go with the norm or try something less expected with a female protagonist.
Finally we asked our audience what they thought would create the most tension. Our results showed that almost 3/4 would find silence the most intimidating, however there was an interesting rest that showed more people would find fast-paced music better than slow-paced music in regards to creating tension, which we will bear in mind when filming and editing our film.
Our results were not all helpful, however, as we received a few inappropriate responses, such as the examples below, that we had to disregard for the immature nature. However on the whole our research and the responses we received are very useful and will help us with our film!
