Audince testing - Shiraz Zafar

Audience review

When making any production, we need to take into consideration the interests of the viewers. The target audience are the people who the production will be delivered to. To find out the vital information needed to create a production that our target audience would like, we decided to hand out a questionnaire to a random selection of people. We hoped that this method of market research would aid in creating a good thriller sequence. From the results of the questionnaire we are able to get an idea of who are target audience are, and what interests them to watching a good thriller movie. The results we received were put into Pie charts as percentages.

The first question we chose to ask was ‘What age group do you fit in to?’ This question was important to find out as we need to no what ages expect certain elements of conventions in a thriller. From the results, we found out that 53%, which slightly over half of the people were asked were in the ages from 15 – 18 years of age. This helped us to making our production, as we now know that the majority of our target audience are in between the ages of 15 and 18, but also overall would appeal to ages up to 35 years old. So if we were to distribute this thriller, we would advertise it near the places teenagers hang out. For example, colleges and local cinemas.

The next question was ‘What gender are you?’ This is another important question as this could help us decide on who will be protagonist and antagonist would be for our thriller. For example, If there are a lot of teenage females watching thrillers, then we know in our production, would should have a female to be the protagonist and this could attract more females to watch the sequence. The female role of the protagonist represents power, authority and confidence; this would draw in the female audience. In our result we found out that females like to watch thrillers slightly more than the males. 54% of females answered this questionnaire and 46% of males answered it. There is not that much of a gap between genders. Both genders are interested in thriller movies. So during the production we would have a plot that satisfies both genders.

The third question was ‘what is you ethnic background?’ This is another important question to ask the audience. This is because during our production we need to be careful not to offend any types of ethnicity. This is a very important factor to take into consideration, as this would affect a lot of people. The whole aim of making the production is to satisfy the viewer’s needs. These results varied in different ranges. Mostly every type of ethnic background would enjoy watching a thriller. The results were that 13% were white British, 13% were white European, 13% were Asian Pakistani, Asian Indian were 7%, black British were 7%, black Caribbean were 21%, black African were 13% and other ethnicities were of 13%. This shows us a wide range for out target audience. The reason we chose several ethnicities were to make all types of people feel needed. This is to show them their views count to and would contribute to making our thriller sequence.

The forth question was ‘how often do you watch thriller movies?’ This is a question that would ultimately tell us if thrillers are a popular genre. We found out that 33% of the people said that they watch thrillers a lot, 41% of the people watch it frequently, and the other 26% of the people watch it rarely. With the results we found out that thrillers are a popular genre and are watched a lot of the time.

The fifth question was ‘in the thrillers you have recently seen, which of them features have more than one convention?’ The Dark Night was the chosen the most out of a range of different films. The audience felt that this thriller had more than one convention, which I also feel is true. The Dark Knight was at 22% out of a range of 10 thriller movies. The other top 5 which were chosen were Batman Begins at 9%, The Departed at 9%, Déjà vu at 8%, The Prestige at 9% and The Bourne Ultimatum at 17%. All these thrillers were scene to have more than one convention.

The sixth question was ‘what convention do you enjoy seeing when watching a thriller movie? The two most popular conventions which were chosen were Suspense and Action conventions. These were at 29% and 27%. We now know that in the making of our thriller we should use the conventions of suspense and action the most as this is what our target audience like to watch.

The seventh question was ‘which of these thrillers have you seen recently? The most popular film out of a range of 10 was the thriller The Dark Knight which was at 21%. This was highly enjoyable to our audience; along with this film was The Bourne Ultimatum which was at 15%. When making our thriller we would use different elements of conventions from these thrillers and incorporate them in our 2 minute sequence. Hopefully this would keep the audience on their edges of their seats.

The eighth question is ‘do you prefer single strand narratives or multi-strand narratives?’ This question is most relevant to find out if our audience like to watch just one story happening in a thriller, or a number of different stories happening in a thriller. This question, again, will help us decide which of the strand narratives to use in our 2 minute thriller sequence. The results were that 53% of our audience preferred to watch single strand narrative and 47% of our audience would prefer multi strand narratives. We now need to figure out a time of narrative to use in our sequence that would satisfy all of our audiences.

The ninth question is ‘what do you think of the Missing Suspect synopsis?’ This question being asked is to find out whether our audience like of dislike our thriller opening. Overall, our audience were really impressed with our synopsis and were eager to watch the 2 minute sequence. The results were that 27% said the synopsis was very good, 37% said it was good, 20% said it was fair and liked it, 7% said bad and dislike the synopsis and 7% said it was very bad. With this feedback we were quite pleased that most of the audience liked our synopsis, which meant the actual sequence would be quite popular.

The tenth question is ‘what do you think of the Missing Suspect script?’ The script is basically just showing people, who have what role and the dialogue. This question is similar to the ninth question. The results were that 13% thought our script was very good, 27% thought it was good, 33% said it was fair, 20% said it was bad and 7% said it was very bad. From these results, we agreed that maybe the audience were not to found of our script, or maybe the script itself was not good enough. If this is the case, in the future, we would make sure our script satisfies everyone.

The eleventh question is ‘do you think this synopsis links to the Thriller Genre?’ This question is asked to find out whether our synopsis fits into the thriller genre. We are happy to say that our synopsis does fit into this genre. Our audience also agreed this as the results stated that 80% said it did fit into the thriller genre, but 20% did not agree with this. Overall, the majority of our audience believed that it did fit into this genre. This tells us that the codes and conventions used in this sequence did fit the thriller genre, so would end in a successful product.

The final question, which is the twelfth question, says ‘what age certificate do you think The Missing Suspect synopsis and script fit into?’ The results were that 33% of the audience said it was a 18 certificate, 40% agreed it was a 15
Certificate and the other 27% believed it was a 12A certificate.