The document discusses audience research conducted for a social realism film trailer targeting 16-25 year olds. A questionnaire given to the target audience found that they enjoyed the genre and were not distressed by scenes of drugs/alcohol. Feedback on the trailer found that it successfully established the genre through its style, locations, and lack of dialogue. Elements like a scream and violent scenes were engaging for viewers. While the trailer was successful overall, the document notes fighting scenes could be improved.

1. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

2. Establishing Our Target AudienceOur target audience is a wide audience of male and female, 16-25 year olds with a socio-economic status of C-D (lower middle class- working class). As our film is a social realism film the characters are also of this status and so this appeals to our target audience as they will be able to relate to the film and will feel emotionally involved. The Demographic profile of our target audience is B-E which is also middle-lower working class which again reflects the profile of the characters in our film.

3. Regarding ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’, we worked out which needs our film would fulfill which were the needs of love/ belonging as the audience would be able to relate to the characters in the film. This helped us establish more detail surrounding our target audience.

4. We found, based on Young and Rubicam’s Cross-Cultured Consumer Characteristics that our film would be targeted at ‘Mainstreamers’.

5. This group seeks comfort in conformity and as our film trailer and products surrounding the trailer conform to many film (trailer, poster and magazine) conventions it would therefore appeal to this group.

6. It is important that our film appeals to this group as this group is 40% of the consumer market and so loosing this group’s appeal would significantly affect our film’s success. (www.allisonmedia.net)

7. Secondary AudienceAs I have already outlined, our target audience is a large mass audience and as the typical film consumer audience age of 16-25, this audience is financially good for our product as teens and young adults have more spare money to spend on films and magazines. Although we have a large mass audience, I feel we also have a secondary target audience. Due to the film being a British social realism film, our secondary audience is British men of an older age (older than 25) as the issues in our film may appeal to the older British man such as social issues of alcohol and poverty.

8. Secondary Audience I also think the twist on the protagonist’s gender appeals to men. The central character of a social realism film is conventionally a male and the ‘heart throb’ of the film e.g the protagonists in the films ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘Billy Elliot’ are both male, and therefore would attract women. However, as our protagonist is female and potentially a sex symbol, this would attract more men to see the film and buy the film magazine the film is featured in.

9. Audience ResearchAfter establishing our target audience it was important to make sure we addressed the needs of our audience and so some research was vital. After discussing the content of our film we constructed a questionnaire relating to issues of the content of our film.

10. The QuestionnaireThe questions were:1)Age: 2)Sex: 3)Do you prefer a male or female protagonist (leading character)? 4)Do you enjoy social realism films? (e.g. This is England, Billy Elliot, Trainspotting, Green Street) 5)How often do you watch films? 6)Do scenes of drug/alcohol abuse shown in films distress you? 7)Do you know people involved in drug taking/alcohol abuse and violence?

11. The questionnaire was really specific to the genre and content of our trailer so we could quickly see our target audience’s views of the genre in order to please their needs as an audience.

12. All the people who completed the questionnaire were both male and female and in the age group of 16-25 so this again helped us to see specifically what our target audience thought of the genre. The pie chart shows how the age range was fairly even.

13. The chart shows that half of the participants said that they would prefer a male protagonist and the other half said they would prefer a female protagonist. This outcome was valuable as some of the male participants said that they would prefer a female protagonist which confirmed our secondary audience and as many people preferred a female protagonist .

14. Conclusion of Audience Research All 10 participants said that they enjoy social realism films which showed that our choice of genre appealed to this audience and that we had got our target audience right. None of the participants said that drug/alcohol abuse distressed them which was also a valuable result as it showed that we were able to put scenes of drugs/drug taking in our trailer without offending or distressing our large mass target audience. Overall, the questionnaire showed us that the issues and genre of our film trailer were relevant to the lives of the people in our target audience and therefore would appeal to them. It also showed that the risk of having an unconventionally female protagonist would work and would in fact attract a secondary audience.

15. Audience Feedback After completing all our products we devised another questionnaire for members of our audience to fill out after watching our film trailer. This was to see if we had been successful in addressing our audience.

16. Feedback QuestionnaireThe questions on our feedback questionnaire were:1)Do you think the product is typical of a film trailer of the social realism genre? If so in what ways is it similar? 2) Does anything make it different? Does anything stand out from the typical? How?3) Does the trailer help establish the genre of the film? How?4) Name two interesting/impressive elements from the video.5) Could this product be stronger?6) Do you think the pace of the video if typical of this kind of product?Again the questions are very specific and ask for detail, this was so we could get the most effective feedback possible and know exactly what our audience was thinking.

17. ResultsThis chart shows the results of the question ‘Do you think the product is typical of a film trailer of the social realism genre? If so in what ways is it similar? ‘All of our interviewees thought our product looked like a typical social realism trailer. This means our product was successful as the audience were able to recognise the genre and also that our product looked professional.

18. There were many reasons giving for answering yes to question one. This was one interesting answer given: This answer clearly shows that the locations, colour grading and other mise en scene used fitted our genre perfectly and did not give off the wrong connotations e.g. it was clear to this person that it was not a Hollywood blockbuster.

19. This answer given for question number two is interesting as it shows us how we managed to make our product unique and interesting. There were many similar answers to this, the use of hand held camera seemed popular with our audience and the fact that we did not include any dialogue also seemed to have a dramatic effect as another person wrote ‘the lack of speech made it different’.Therefore I think not using any dialogue made our trailer more interesting and the hand held camera did the same.

20. This answer to question three shows that the props used (picture on the left) worked in establishing the genre. This was something we had researched- as shown below in a mood board, and so it shows that our research results were correct.