Audience Research

For audience research we decided it would be best to do a questionnaire. We had preset answers, because we felt we couldn't trust our friends and family not to be immature. So we gave them the set answers to choose from so we would have more useful answers.

Because we asked most of our friends to do the survey for us, the majority of the people who responded were within our age range. We decided to use this when we picked the target audience and the specification for our film.

Because Parkstone Grammar School is a same sex school, most of the people who responded to the survey were female. This didn't really effect the outcome of this survey, and didn't change our target audience.

Most people didn't care whether the main character was male or female because it doesn't really effect the story of a supernatural horror film. The protagonists of supernatural horrors are fairly balanced, it's not a particularly male or female dominated genre. We went with a female actress in the end because Erika just so happened to be one of the people interested in it.

Most people wanted a slightly older protagonist, however due to our circumstances, the actors available to us were the people who go to my theatre school, and I happen to be one of the oldest students in my class. Erika is 14/15 so she's a little bit younger, but that was the second most popular age choice, and we had to work with what our situation gave us.

Most people said they'd prefer tension building within the first two minutes of a film. This is good because it would probably be very difficult to get a jump scare in the first two minutes, and I personally prefer supernatural horrors which build tension in the opening in order to set the scene.

A lot of people said they would prefer little to no dialogue, which is also good because we didn't really want to rely on sound in our film because we didn't exactly trust the quality of it to be great. We think we might have to have some speech in order to try and develop the story more but we would prefer to keep it mostly silent.

Most people said they would prefer a dog in the film, which is good because Ellie and I really wanted to use her dog Bear in the film because he's a very sweet dog.

Finally, the majority said that they would prefer a small amount of main characters in the opening. This is good because this is what me and Ellie wanted to use. We didn't think we would be able to get hold of many actors, so we wanted to keep the amount of characters minimal. We also thought it may look too cluttered if a lot of characters were introduced quickly, and we wanted to focus on the story more.