AS Evaluation Question 5

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

Primary research was essential to my group production as it gave me different view points of thrillers and what to expect from the public, knowledge of film certification and I was able to collect ideas and compare other thriller films to create mine at a good quality. I had many research stages that assisted me with producing our opening sequence including research into age certificates; this research gave me a deep understanding into why films are classified to protect the public from content that is unsuitable for their age group, and to stop children from seeing explicit images that may harm them. From this, my group and I decided to rate our thriller clip a 15 as the idea of the girl being taken seems quite violent, but you would not actually see this take place, and so it is simply and idea. Another source of research that was carried out to assist us was the narrative theory; here we were able to comprehend Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov and Aristotle’s Theory and relate them to our narrative. When comparing my narrative to the 3 theories, the one that I found suits it best is Aristotle’s theory that any film should be made using themes. I took inspiration from this theory by emphasizing the dramatic question raised through the use of enigma throughout. 

One of the main sources of research carried out was a questionnaire, where my group asked our target audience of around 15+, various questions as to what they thought should be included in a thriller film. We asked 40 people the questions on the questionnaire, the majority of those being from our target audience age range. We then thought the best way to present our findings would be by using pie charts as this is a clear way of showing the data we have collected. When creating the questionnaire we wanted to ask a variety of open and closed questions to make our results more reliable. An open question is one that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no answer, and so forces the person to give a more detailed answer. A closed question is simply where you answer with one word such as yes, no or maybe. By having the ‘other’ option mixed with the other available options, we created an open question, giving the audience the opportunity to say what they thought if they wished to. What I realized by the open questions not being answered was that people don’t like to decide or give their opinion as to what they want to see. I therefore concluded from this that viewers of the thriller genre like to be surprised by what they are watching; it doesn’t necessarily matter what the narrative is about, as long as the audience feel something from the suspense and tension created. Collecting this data was beneficial as it gave me and my group guidance with choosing what aspects such as conventions to use in our opening clip. It helped us with planning as it told us how important each aspect is and the amount of detail we need to go in if we wanted our clip to be effective.