The document summarizes the results of a questionnaire about audience preferences for thriller films. It found that most respondents were between 16-18 years old and more males than females responded. Adventure and horror were the most popular thriller genres. Commonly cited favorite thriller films started right away with story and had themes of horror or adventure. Most respondents associated dark music with thrillers. Respondents preferred an engaging opening sequence that built suspense, such as using a flashback to a climax. Based on these findings, the group plans to make a crime thriller with dark music that starts right into the story.

1. Amir Jaffer

2. Purpose
The purpose of this questionnaire was to find out the opinion’s of the
audience who in the real world would possibly view our thriller. This
information in the further stages will help me and my group in deciding what
aspects of opening sequence we are going to include.

3. Gender and Age Representation
Gender Age
10-12
years
13-15
years
MALE
16-18
FEMALE
years
18+ years
This chart shows that the majority of people I
The graph above shows that I had asked where between the age ranger of
had asked more male then 16-18, this is because the social group in
female, this was un-intentional which I usually associate to watch a thrillers
as I had distributed it out to are within that age, also I had not asked any
large group which just under the age of 12 as I thought they
happened to have fewer wouldn’t really supply valuable enough
females then males. responses. Therefore we will be making a film
based for the majority age group as they
would be the only ones able to understand it.

4. Thriller genre’s Genre percentages
Crime
Horror
Adventure
Other
Male Female As we can see from the data
gathered, the majority of the audience
would prefer to view a adventure or
horror related thrillers. How ever there
are a few who choose the other two
options, I think the fact that not many
people chose crime is interesting as I
would have thought the majority would
have chosen that as I would have.
Therefore from these results our group
will go against the obvious and decide to
do a more crime related film.

5. Audience’s favourite thriller films
While I was going through my questionnaire feedback from the
audience, there were a few which cropped up more then once, these films
included 2 of Christopher Nolan’s two most successful films ‘Inception’ and
‘The dark Night’. Also Darren Aronofsky award winning ‘Black Swan’, finally
most curiously of all ‘The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo’ from David Fincher.
The common thing amongst these films is that they all start straight away
and get right in to the story, which I assume allows the audience to use their
brains in a way that would mean they form their own opinion. The storyline
doesn’t seem to develop until after the opening sequence, also they all seem
to run around the most common theme’s which were selected by my
respondents, the genre’s of horror and adventure.
However through out all my evidence I also noticed that many of the other
films selected were based around a common genre of horror, I think that this
is good element to have included within our piece which we did also another
element we are going to include is the idea that the storyline starts straight
away with no credits until after the opening act occurs.

6. Music association
10
8
6
4
2 Female
0 Male
The evidence retrieved back from the respondents that the majority of both
male’s and female’s would associate dark music with thrillers and this goes
along with the conventions on which thrillers were formed. The anomaly is the
selection of the ‘other’ category in which only one person had selected. The
respondent wrote down RnB which is probably due to the fact he most likely
prefers to watch more crime related thrillers. I think to retrieve this information
was important as it shows us what type of music would effect the audience
most in feeling the suspense and tension in which a thriller is supposed to
portray. Therefore as a group we are going to use mainly dark music with abit
of each other types elements

7. Fast
Music tempo Slow
Normal
Mixture
The response I had been given was predictable as many opening sequence music
usually has a variety of different tempo’s and pitches. The one thing in which I had
not expected to see was no respondent to have picked a slow tempo, after the last
set of data I had received which was music types, the majority choose dark, I
would usually have associated a slow tempo to dark music if it was ever to be used
in a thriller. Also during the initial starting stages my group and I were all agreed
on have a slow tempo starting music as it would give the effect of sinister.

8. Opening sequence Ideas….
The final question which I had asked was what kind of opening film sequence
they would prefer to view.
The sort of responses given all varied, a few of the responses included such
things as clear starting and understandable, a panorama of the setting, a
clue of what the film is about and where the ‘Protagonist Characters’ are
introduced.
The idea’s which crept up a lot included making the opening engaging
‘incentive to watch the whole movie’, Also the build up of suspense. Finally
the idea which my group wanted to use and decided during the initial stages
was a scene from later on in the movie as a flashback to allow the viewer to
become engaged straight away, one person mentioned it should be like a ‘mini
climax’. I think this would be really effective as personally this is what I would
expect to see.