Audience research
- 1. Male or Female? Male Female By establishing the genre of the audience I can suite the plot of the story to the film. It also helps me to decide upon cast members as casting a male actor can attract many females to watch the film and vice versa. However, in my results you can see that I have an even spread of both men and women. This allows a lot of room for me to make my own decisions about items such as, for example, the colour of the font which, as a really basic example, could be blue for a male biased audience and pink for a female biased audience.
- 2. Age under 10 10-15years 16-21years 22-27years 28+ years By finding out the age of the target market I can establish many things. One of the most important is the age certificate of the film. As you can see, majority of the people who will be watching the film are aged between 16 and 21 years, this, therefore allows me to make the decision that the age certification will be 15. I can also now add in elements of violence or language that would not be appropriate for younger audiences if I desired. I widens the amount of elements I can include in the film trailer.
- 3. What is youfavorite genre of film? Romanc Comedy Sci-Fi Film Noir Horror Westers Neo-Noir Deciding upon the genre of the trailer is obviously a big aspect. As you can see, from a variety of choices it is evident that both Neo-Noir and Film Noir are the favourites of the audience. For this reason I will be creating a Film Noir trailer in order to please the audience and target as many people as possible.
- 4. Which conventions wouldyou like to see in a Film Noir trailer? Male Detective Female Detective Guns Cars Femme Fatale Smoking Alcohol Shadows Conventions allow an audience to connect with a film, I thought it was important to find out which conventions they would like to see most within a trailer in order to, once more, satisfy the audience. As you can see, the two most important aspects of the film according to the audience are the Male Detective and the Femme Fatale. This immediately has allowed me to decide upon two characters to include within the trailer. I can now see that including Smoking and Guns is something that will allow me to impress the audience by meeting their expectations. Due to the lack of people that voted for cars and alcohol I will probably not include them as it seems that it could create a problem with the majority of the target audience.
- 5. Colour or Blackand White? Colour Black and White When I asked whether the audience would like to see a Film Noir in colour or Black and White the majority said Black and White. This was something of a surprise to me because of the modern technology that we have, however, in order to please my audience I will be filming in Black and White. Overall, the trailer will probably look more effective like this and create more verisimilitude when considering that Film Noir was made in the 40’s and 50’s when most filming was in Black and White.
- 6. Do you liketo visit film websites? Yes No By establishing whether my audience like to visit film websites it allows me to make a decision upon whether to include a URL in my trailer. With the split being half and half it will be a tough decision but, I think it would be better to have the site there to allow those in the audience who would like to visit the site to be able to.
- 7. Large or Independent Large Independent I asked whether the audience would rather see a film made by a large company or an independent company in order to decide upon which company logos to include in my trailer. With the majority saying they would rather see a film made by an independent company I will be including independent labels, there is also a possibility that I could create my own.
- 8. Do you takefilm reviews into consideration? Yes No I asked the audience if they were influenced by reading critic’s reviews of films. By asking this, I can grasp an idea about including brief captions potentially from critics or magazines, this could contain a “star rating” as an easy visual representative. Again, I received an even split of those who would/would not consider reviews. I think I will probably avoid the use of captions with ratings etc. because I think they are often a convention of a trailer created by a large company and as I established before my trailer will be that of an independent film company.
- 9. Would you liketo see content from social networking sites? Yes No With film trailers there are often small mentions about content from social networking sites which have logos and small pieces of text to search for in order to create a following of hype about the film. After asking whether this is the kind of thing that my audience would like to see, the majority said “yes”, with this in mind I will now include social networking logos at the end of my trailer. I think this will allow me to exploit various other methods of advertising on top of a trailer, poster and magazine front cover.