Audience Research- who would be the audience for your media product?

1.       A Nightmare On Elm Street and scream received the highest response rate as being a person’s favorite slasher film. Due to this, I believe that as a group we should take aspects out of those films and incorporate them into our film opening, if possible, to make our film opening appeal to its target audience.

2.       How people consume the media is mainly through their mobile phone, so in order to make our film opening appealing to our target audience, I believe that it should be in a format that can be shared across all social media websites. Therefore this increases the promotion of our film opening and our institution. If we were to produce a whole film, we would produce a trailer which would draw in the target audience in to watch the film when it is released. It could also be submitted to online film sites and submitted to TV and cable shows.

3.       Freddy Krueger was seen to be the most scariest slasher villain, so in this case I think that if we was to continue to create a whole film, our villain would possibly have features of Freddy Krueger: such as the fx makeup, to create the burn like features. Although in our opening the villain’s identity isn’t revealed which gives the audience a false sense of security and makes them have no connection with this character, so they therefore empathize with the younger characters more.

4.       The most popular scariest murder weapon was a machete. In the opening of our film the victim isn’t revealed until the very end, so we therefore do not need a weapon as we only need to establish his presence. Also there was another response which stated: “Psychological. Give the victim and audience a false sense of security, that as well as some form of self-body mutilation is freaky (without the killer having powers or being some sort of creature). However as this was not the predominant response, we went with the conventional villain, whose identity isn’t revealed as you cannot see their appearance, so it disguises them completely of identity and emotion; giving the audience no sense of connection with the villain.

5.       Red is believed to be the color most associated with slashers in our survey response; I believe that this is due to the idea of people being killed and the color red being associated with blood, also red connotes danger which is connected with the horror film genre, as the conventional characters are a villain who is the antagonist of all the possibly psychological or physical danger the group of protagonists.

6.       The woods was seen to be the scariest film location, and as a group we found that this was particularly useful as before the survey was sent out we had initial thoughts of filming in the woods. Due to this link I agree that our film will appeal to our target audience.

7.       The main response of our survey was from 15-17 year olds and this is believed to be our target audience. As our characters in the opening are around 16 and 17 the audience can relate to their feelings, facial expressions and body language.

8.       Horror and comedy were seen to be an equal response as people’s favorite film genre. Due to this we did not want to do a hybrid film, we did however take into account the comedy side of things and words such as ‘slut’ in our script, so it establishes a sense of comedy within the dialect and appeals to the target audience.

9.       I noticed that in our survey the majority of girls completed the survey , so therefore I believe that if girls were just to watch our film opening, I believe that they could relate to the dialect, body language, facial expressions and intensity of the opening.

10.   People believed that the music did add intensity to the film, however there was another response which stated “only when used in the right areas and the right music. Silence can be far more dramatic. Sound effects can also be better such as breathing, disturbance noises etc.” Due to this we considered that we would possibly use a non-diegetic soundtrack of teenage music to overlay the first minute of the film opening to establish the age and create the audience with a sense of normality, however we then wanted to contrast that with a more high pitched sound into the insidious soundtrack to connote the upcoming danger and the title ‘FLASHBACK’ will appear lastly on screen which leaves the opening on a cliff-hanger.
I decided to format this questionnaire electronically as it can be shared on different social media, and attract our target audience. If I was to do a paper format questionnaire, I believe that many people would just throw it away and I would have not received as many responses as I did, this is due to media saturation. We attracted our target audience as we asked them about what they would want to see in some aspects or what is seen to be the best/scarriest slasher location and asked them their opinions so it would appear to them, so from their film experience they were able to reflect upon that to help us produce a conventional slasher film, but with aspects they would want to see and exclude parts that they wouldn't enjoy.