Audience Research
When producing a film it is vital that the target audience is thoroughly thought about. The film production must entertain the specific audience so knowing what they want in an action film is important for our production to thrive.
Initial Questionnaire
We decided to include two questionnaires this year so that we could delve into the opinions of the general public. The first questionnaire that we created can be found below. This questionnaire was created to find out who my specific target audience were. The questions are extremely basic but helped us to finally decide what genre/sub-genre we wanted our production to go down after chopping and changing between action and drama films. We then began to ask general questions, allowing the people answering to give an open answer towards their feelings of action films. Feel free to complete it!
Detailed Questionnaire
The second questionnaire went into more depth to do with the action film genre and our film. As supposed to simply answering generic genre questions, this questionnaire asked specific questions that would affect our decision when producing our film. We had a number of responses for this questionnaire, so the feedback was very useful for us.
Responses
We had a total of 25 responses for this questionnaire which allowed for a mixed range of responses as feedback:
This question in our questionnaire was general so that we got an idea of the largest age group. Because most of the responses were from people from my school, we expected the 17-19 category to be the largest which did make the questionnaire slightly bias. This feedback would affect our BBFC certificate as we must take into account that 18 year olds may expect strong language, violence etc in action films.
This question remains broad so that we can a vague idea of what the audience expect to find within the genre. With our productions having to be short stories, with little chance of a backstory, we expected the feedback to want a small amount of characters. The majority thought that 3-4 characters was about right for our film which was a little more than we intended.
Question 3 was similar to question 2 but instead asked about the gendered of the main protagonist. Unsurprisingly our sway of male responses over female lead to over half of our audience thinking that a male protagonist would fit the role better, perhaps because of vital characteristics that are stereotyped with men e.g strong, brave, fearless etc.
This question gave us feedback on how much dialogue we should include in our film. From other short film examples from the action genre, the dialogue was limited and instead told the story through quick cuts and fast-paced shots. We wanted to check that this was the case with the people we asked, to which it was by the majority of our audience.
With this question, we hoped to gain a focus for our film as well as an idea of how complex the story should be. The majority of people thought that an ambitious setting and atmosphere were the key features of a successful action film, which are key conventions that most action films typically include. To our surprise, a large amount of feedback said that they prefered simple stories as supposed to complicate dones perhaps so that they can be followed more easily and develop more of an understanding through this.
With our production being a short film (lasting a maximum of 5 minutes, we were expecting the audience to want the action to start from the off with a small amount of spoken backstory as it slows down the flow of the film. Surprisingly, audiences liked the idea of including a flashback to open the film but, in all honesty, we find that technique to be very cliché and overused.
With this final ending of our production, the option of having a sequel was blanked by the majority which left either an open suspense ending, or a conclusive ending.We, as a group, agreed that we liked films that leave you with questions, so we believe it won't be a bad thing for the audience to be left with perhaps a question or two because then they can build their own conclusions as to what they think might have happened.
