The film industry spends significant time and money conducting test screenings and market research to understand what audiences want. This helps ensure their films will appeal to target demographics and be financially successful. Research identifies that the target audience for horror films is 15-25 year olds. Distributors use findings from Pearl and Dean research and similar films to determine their audience. Feedback from test screenings is crucial at different stages of production to improve story clarity and make necessary changes. Conducting questionnaires also provides useful feedback about audience preferences to incorporate into films.

1. Why does the film industry spend
so much time and money test
screening films to invited
audiences or finding out what
audiences like through market
research?

2. Firstly, we know that in this day and age the film industry do
spend a lot of money and time on test screenings to audiences
and market research. I know that this happens in order for that
particular distributor/producer to relate to their audiences and
find out what it is that they like. Before making a movie and
spending money/ wasting time, these major movie companies
need to know if their ideas are liked by the public and are going
to sell well. The main aim is to appeal to a mass target
audience and include as much of their favorite things in the
movie as possible. I have learnt that the target audience for
horror movies today is from the ages of 15 to 25/30 year olds.
This then shows that the best way to advertise and locate
these mass audiences is to use it in a way they will
understand; social networking and social media. Successful
market research is the key to making any product work, you
have to know what your audiences are going to like and what is
going to make money. In addition to this, market research also
allows companies to know where they stand and fit in the
market. DVD, Cinema, Box Office and Netflix are all popular
ways of distributing a movie to the mass target audience.

3. Audiences
The audiences we are aiming to connect with and
targeting are 15 to 30 year old male and females. As
expected with any films including dolls, we know for this
particular film females will be more interested than males.
PEARL AND DEAN played a big part in finding out our
target audience. As a group we decided to research other
films simular to ours such as ‘The Conjuring’ and
‘Annabelle’. Through the use of pearl and deans website
we discovered that our target audience was in fact 15-25
year olds and 26 to 34 year olds.

4. Feedback:
Throughout the process of creating our three products, our teacher drilled us
into making sure we always got feedback at different stages of the process
from our other class mates.
The first time we got feedback from our class mates was the first screening of
our teaser trailer; this screening included basic clips of what we had filmed for
our teaser trailer. No editing or sound was added to these clips. Feedback
which we received was positive and most of our audience said we had got the
raw essentials, all we needed to do was piece it all together in a professional
way.
The second screening in which we received feedback was once we had added
sound, titles, transitions and filters to our clips. We had also edited most clips
and shots at this post. Feedback was again positive however our audiences
were confused a bit by the story line itself. This made us look back at the
trailer we had created and change some things around, we even reshot some
of our trailer in order to make the storyline that much clearer to our audiences.
The 3rd and final screening we showed our class mates all 3 of our products
together and received again even more detailed feedback of what worked well
and what didn't’t. After receiving some negative feedback concerning font we
had used in our teaser trailer, as a group we looked back over the titles etc.
and made some slight changes. However, most of our teaser trailer was a
success and our audience seemed to think so too.

5. In addition to the last slide, another way in which we gained
feedback from our target audience and market research was to
use questionnaires in which my group and myself had made.
Questionnaires work really well when wanting feedback from your
audience because you can decide to ask direct questions about
certain aspects. For example we used these questionnaires to find
out what our target audience liked most about horror movies and
then chose to include as much of what they liked as possible- this
helped my group and I to reach our mass target audience and
please as many people as possible.

6. How did the feedback effect
us?One thing our audience really liked after each screening of our teaser
trailer and also whilst looking at both the magazine and the poster was
the hair, makeup, costume and use of props. They said that we went to
great lengths in order to make it look authentic and horror like. This
was pleasing to hear and in turn made us work even harder on the
editing and piecing together of all three products in order to keep up
this authentic, horror like theme. One thing that made us as a group
change a lot of our teaser trailer was in fact the storyline, some of our
audiences didn't’t understand the way we had developed and
presented it, for that reason we made serious changes to our teaser
trailer which helped make it better.
Overall I think audience feedback, (target audience feedback) is really
important because it helps piece together something really good that
people want to invest time and money in. In addition, because we have
spent so much of our time into making the trailer we see it with a very
optimistic view, but by having people that don’t have any attachments
to it, we can see it in a new way and make serious changes that we
couldn’t otherwise do.