Group: Audience Research

Purpose
From the questionnaires we aimed to discover:

• what features our core audience would find more effective in a horror film.
• what aspects of our concept they would find most appropriate and how we could improve on certain aspects to make them better.
• what are the audiences preferences in horror films, what kind of weapon/genre they prefer or find most effective.
• we wanted to find out what they would look for in an antagonist so that we could shape our character around there answers.

Methodology

How we carried out our questionnaires:

• we aimed to supply the candidates with a large amount of different question types so that we could interpret and represent our findings in different ways.
• We questioned the participants about what weapons they like to see used in horror films first of all because this would help us to gauge whether they liked to see gore in films.
• The classic "circle the one you like most" method was used for the next question. we did this because we wanted to find out what kind of sub genre our core audience preferred.
• We made this question simple because we needed clear results and felt that this type of answering technique would be very simple and understandable.
• Our antagonist was undecided at this point so we asked what the audience looked for in terms of personality in an antagonist. we used a quantitative question because we felt as if it would be better to have statistics we could relate back to when deciding what traits our antagonist should represent.
• Music could be quite important in our horror opening so we asked how important music is from a scale of very to not important.

Results

From the 15 people we asked to fill out the survey, the majority were male and teenagers. It was important to ask teenagers because the core audience who watch horror films are 15-24, so this gave us a good idea of what they want to see in a horror opening. We got a very mixed bunch of results which gives us a lot to think about when shooting.


A filled out copy of our questionnaire

Question 1:

The first asked the participant to indicate with a number from 1-5 what their preferred weapon of choice is in horror. From our results, we found that most people put a number 1 for pistol. However, this is not accurate as we would need to add up the score for each weapon and see which one got the lowest score overall. After doing this the results were:

• Pistol-47
• Knife-46
• Shotgun-48
• Bare Hands-41
• Axe-48

From these results we can see that our chosen participants rated bare hands highest overall.

Question 2:

In this question we asked the participant to circle their favourite horror sub-genre. The choices we gave them were Slasher, Psychological, Thriller and Zombie. The results were:

• Slasher 4
• Psychological 5
• Zombie 2
• Thriller 4

The results show that the most popular sub-genre was psychological.

Question 3:

The results are show below:

From the results we can see there was a tie between important and not important. This is a problem as they are complete opposites meaning that our target audience is split over what they want.

Question 4:

We asked our audience to indicate on a scale from 1-7 to indicate their preferred characteristic of a horror antagonist. On one end of the scale at number one was psychopathic and on the other end at seven was sane. The results are shown below:

From the table we can see that most people chose number 1. This means our audience would like to see a completely psychopathic antagonist rather than one that is fairly sane.

Question 5:

Our next question was how important is music in a horror opening. Again the participant had to circle their preferred choice. The options were very important, slightly important, important and not important. The results were as follows:

• Very important 8
• Important 5
• Slightly important 0
• Not important 3

From the results we can tell that having music in our opening is vital to creating the right mood or atmosphere.

Question 6:

In this question, we asked an open question to our participants. We asked them to describe what music best fits the horror genre. The general consensus with the results was that it would have to build up to something creating a scary atmosphere. This would mean any music involving crescendos would be ideal for our horror opening.

Question 7:

This question simply asked what gender antagonist people preferred. The results were:

• Male 11
• Female 4

The majority preferred a male antagonist, which means in our horror opening we will be challenging the dominant view of what gender antagonist it should be.

Evaluation

Throughout the questionnaires there are some questions which support our ideas and views for the production, however some do not. For example, in question 1 the data shows that the most popular weapon in the clip would be bare hands, which supports our original ideas. As well as question one, question two implies that our census are the target audience as they describe their favourite sub-genre of horror as psychological horror, which is what we're aiming for showing us that the data is all valid. However not all the data is that valid because the ones who answered the questions might have been rushing it or just answering the questions they saw first depending on the layout of the question not considering the other possible answers of the question which could have swayed their answers the other way giving us completely different results. All of these could have changed the potential results, however as a group we are happy with our results from the target audience as they support our ideas. Lets get filming!