Audience Research

Before we, my group, could even begin thinking about camera shots or filming locations we needed to do some rather extensive research to find out if what we were doing would essentially sell in a real world situation. Thankfully this isn't a real world situation and billions of dollars aren't on the line but none-the-less we were treating it as if it were so the research had to be done.

Our primary method of research was a single survey. It had a list of questions, 10 in total, that we felt gave us exactly what we needed to know what people want to see in our trailer. The survey was hosted on a website called Surveymonkey, we were able to draw up said survey and share links to friends, family and others online so they could easily and swiftly respond. Currently, the survey has had 34 responses and considering the small scale and budget we have, I'd personally consider that to be good.

Taking not only the quantitative information but the qualitative I have devised a series of charts showing our results and I will proceed to explain what the results meant for us and why the questions were there in the first place.

Question 1:

Question 1 was simply age, our research has shown that a whopping 73.5% of respondents were aged 16-20 which gives us solid info that our target audience compose of those in their late teens and early twenties.

Question 2:

Call it the second part to question 1 if you like as it gives us further information about our target audience, specifically gender. It was revealed that more males responded than females and seeing as I asked that only people with an interest of horror respond to this survey, we have pretty conclusive results that back up the idea that the core target audience for horror is males in their late teens and early twenties.

Question 3:

The 3rd question relates to sub-genres of horror. The question gave a brief list and an "other" option and asking that respondents select 2 categories at maximum that they prefer. The "winner" here isn't as clear as the previous questions, in descending order, the top 3 genres were Psychological, Zombie then Sci-fi. Ghost/paranormal followed suit being the 4th most popular, but the others on the list, including the more specific answers under the "other" category were too small of a percentage to take into serious consideration. We eventually decided to go with a Ghost/paranormal themed movie with some Psychological elements as it not only fit with our personally choice and after all, there has to be some artistic freedom but it would have some appeal to the wider audience of horror.

Question 4:

Like 1 and 2, this question was rather simple. Do you like Gore? 73.5% said yes, the rest said no. Based on this we decided to not go overboard and turn this film into a Hostel 3 but include some scenes in the trailer that involved gore, Andy's death scene for example which shows a pitchfork being plunged into his throat.

Question 5:

This question what somewhat more complicated, it was entirely based on the respondents opinion and was much less of a closed question. We asked if there were any particular motifs or themes that they either liked in a horror movie or that scared them. 2 particular things that cropped up often were clowns and ghosts. We decided to go with the whole ghost idea over clowns, mainly due to personal preference but other things that were mentioned including the monster "lurking in the shadows", shots using mirrors and plot twists we decided to utilise in our trailer.

Question 6:

Again, another straightforward question. Do you prefer CCTV or hand-held camerawork compared to other types?

We had 3 categories to choose from, yes, no and both. Whilst there were very few yes answers, the winner was in fact both with 55.9% of the votes so we decided to ditch the idea of having the film almost entirely handheld and CCTV based and instead just utilise these shot types for a hand full of shots for particular effect.

Question 7:

Question 7 asked what the respondents favourite horror movies were. Whilst there wasn't a really obvious specific movie that lots of people liked, movies of the slasher genre usually cropped up and with something else in their answer otherwise it wouldn't make sense that slasher didn't top out list in question 3.

Question 8:

Another broad question, we gave the respondents 5 different categories, Setting, Plot, Characters,  Special Effects and Other, and asked them to say what features of the films they listed above they liked.

In the answers for the "Setting" category there was a distinct repetition of the idea of being somewhere ordinary where anything abnormal happening would be strange and unexpected. Hence, we set our movie or trailer at someones house.

the answers for the plot category were much harder to derive a conclusive answer to what people like in a horror movie plot as the answers were all over the place. One person liked the religious themes in their movie and someone else liked the idea of an unstoppable enemy. Eventually we banded together and added smaller elements of the plots mentioned to advance and develop our own plot.

The Character section had a rather obvious answer that stood out like a sore thumb. Normal People. People seemed to enjoy the fact that the characters in these movies weren't Superman or Blade but instead your average Joe and this was elaborated by some to teenagers and charactersyou felt genuine hate for.

The special effects category had yet another distinct answer, realistic gore but very little else. This fit in great with not only our original idea but our budget, we don't exactly have thousands to spend on an advanced motion capture suit.

And finally, the Other category. Honestly, not much was in here just a reiteration of normal people being the focus.

Overall, asking people to further elaborate on their favourite movies in question 7 gave us a a better understanding of what it was about Scream or The Hills Have Eyes that people liked instead of just saying "They answered Scream, we'll make this a slasher" we can say "We don't have to make it a slasher, but they liked the teenage victim aspect of Scream so lets add that".

Question 9:

For this question we decided that we needed more information about the antagonist, so we simply asked if people preferred a more human or beast-like monster/villain. Human was by far the premiered answer here with 69.7% of the votes so naturally, we went with a humanoid ghost as our antagonist.

Question 10:

Location, location, location. We asked what people preferred as their horror setting. We gave a standard list of horror settings and an other category but the clear winners were "Abandoned Environments", "Urban (Cities Etc)" and "Houses".