Group: Audience Research

Purpose:
The purpose of doing our audience research was to test our concept. It was to help us find out what our target audience liked about horror films and what they thought would work best in the ideas that we had. From the results we gained, it meant we could take those ideas into account to make our horror opening something people will like and want to see.

Methodology:
The method we chose to carry out our audience research was to do a questionnaire. Within this, we used a variety of questions. The type of questions we used were closed questions, open questions, scaled questions, ranked responses and semantic differential in order to get a variety of quantitative and qualitative data. This meant we were able to draw better conclusions from the data we had. We handed out our questionnaires to people within our year group at school and we received 15 out of 20 back.

Results:
From analysing our data, we found that 12 out of 15 people liked the idea of a female being the victim. The majority voted for her to be blonde, innocent and wearing jeans and a t-shirt. 10 out of 15 people voted for her to be aged 15-18. Our results for how the villain should be were an equal weighting between a normal person and a paranormal being. On average, people wanted it to be filmed in conditions where it's starting to get dark but it was an even opinion where half wanted it in rural and empty and half wanted it to be urban and busy. 4 out of 15 people said it is very important to see someone killed in the opening, 2 said important, 4 said slightly important, 2 said not important and 3 said it doesn't matter. In our open questions, the overall opinion of what people expect in a slasher film is for someone to be followed, it to make you jump sometimes and for their to be a mysterious villain. Our final question was asking people what their favourite horror film is. We looked at the answers of these and tried to get some inspiration from their openings.

Evaluation:
From our findings, we have decided to go to use Mel's friend Lizzie and the victim as she is a blonde teenage girl aged 16 and is available from filming. As the results from how the villain should be are of equal weighting, we are deciding to combine the two and show our villain to be a normal but with something small to make him different e.g. contacts. Also, as we also had equal weighting between the conditions for it to be filmed in we have decided to film it in a urban, slightly busy area but not overly crowded as this is quite different to make ours unique.
Some problems with our results are that we only handed out our questionnaires to people within our year group and they are mostly boys who go to our school. This means our results won't be from a mixed range of people but it is our target audience.