Audience research and feedback from first draft part 1

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As part of producing the opening to out Thriller, we decided that we wanted to get some feedback on what others thought of it. We wanted, first of all, to make sure that the feedback we were given was not biased - so we couldn’t ask people, like our families, who would say that they thought it was brilliant as we made it.

We did this in two stages:

The first was that Evie went out and showed it to a couple of groups of people so that we could get some general feedback in terms of what the public thought. Within this, we asked them a series of four questions:

Q1) What would you rate the opening to this film (1-5 stars)?

The results that came back were:

And when the results from this rating trawl are filtered by gender:

This tells us that overall, viewers whose gender was male preferred the opening to those whose gender was female. If we took data from a higher number of people, assuming that this follows the same patterns as the data already shown here, then we would be able to see that it should be a male audience more than a female audience that we should be targeting this film at.

Q2) After watching the opening to our Thriller film, would you be interested in watching the rest of the film?

Once again, we then divided the data into yes and no so that we could see which gender had preference on watching the rest. The results that came back were:

This indicates, again, that boys preferred the film to girls, although only by a small margin. This also showed us that we would need to make some improvements in order to better persuade our audience to carry on watching, so we asked the audience what they liked/disliked about the opening and here are the general responses that we got:

What did you enjoy most?

Good camerawork
Build-up of tension and then a shock to the audience
Cliff-hanger
Range of shots and transitions
Good music
Slight lack of storyline makes it intriguing.
Spoken line unexpected and effective

Is there anything that you didn't like?

Too slow paced
Some of the shots were too long
Not enough storyline
Needs more suspense
Scenes were overpowered by the credits
Too much time on the credits
Not enough shots from above the waist
Too repetitive

This gave us some ideas as to what we should do but - not to discredit the value of the feedback that we had already received - we also wanted to get a professional in to look at our work and see what he thought on the matter.