Audience Research

This chart shows who participated in our questionnaire in terms of male and female. Our group agreed that asking more women than men would give us a wider opinion on the genre of horror, as stereotypically men enjoy this type of movie more. I think this resulted in us getting an accurate target audience for our teaser trailer as we considered females opinions too, and I believe that this would increase numbers of viewing audiences and result in the movie becoming more successful.

This chart is used to show the age of our agreed target audience, 16-18 year-olds. Almost 75% of our questionnare participants were aged 16-18 and I feel that this helped produce an appropriate content to comply with what they agreed as a target audience they wanted to see in a teaser trailer.

This chart shows which genre the questionnaire participants preffered, the most popular being 'psychological' with 13 people agreeing they enjoy this the most. Comparing this to the 6 people who said 'slasher' was their favourite one could agree that psychological is most likely to be suitable for this target audience. However, the genre 'gore' closely followed 'psychological', with 12 people saying they prefer this. This helped our research as we learned from it that to produce a popular, pleasing trailer for our target audiences we had to make a horror/psychological thriller containing some gore.

This chart shows how often our target audience consume horror films. We found the majority watched horror films 'once a month'. Therefore, we know that there is a gap in the market for our horror teaser trailer to appear and that we must time it specifically so our target audience will hopefully want to watch our film in that month.

We also found through our research that our target audience mostly fear the setting of an 'old abandoned house' with the percentage of 47.5% - 19 people. Also, another popular 'scary' setting is the 'woods' with 13 people agreeing with this - 32.5% I feel this helped our group in planning our horror trailer and finding the perfect setting that will produce the popular 'scared' sensation associated with horror movies in our audience.

All of these questions were showing quantitative data which helps us see clearly the percentage and figures from the answers our target audience gave by ticking one box each question.

On the other hand, we had questions that showed qualitative data. These were questions that were open for each person to answer individually and to go into more depth. 
For example:

• What horror film do you like best? 
• What type of advertising most affects you? 
• What do you expect from a trailer?
• What you expect from a horror?

These questions gave us the understanding that the 'Saw' films were most popular. We could interpret from this that it is due to the psychological effect it has on its audience, as the Saw films are renowned for their psychological gore traits, and we planned to use these themes in our trailer. 

Through the use of audience research we found that the type of advertising most influential on our target audience is movie trailers and this helped us in the understanding that our trailer should be highly successful in conjunction with magazines or billboards. 

Our target audience stated through use of answering the questions that within a trailer they expect to see the title, date of release and inter-titles. This gives us a rough idea on how to set out our trailer and what we needed to contain within it. A 'teaser trailer' suggests that the audience are shown just enough to leave them wanting more of the storyline, which is what we tried to do in our trailer. Knowing these facts helped throughout the planning and the production of our teaser trailer.

 

Our audience were very specific with what they expected in horror and what they believed is typical horror conventions - they expected loud, eery, 'creepy' music, amplified sounds in conjuction with flashing images and strange visual effects and flashing images of actors faces that leave the audience confused and on-edge, producing a sense of fear in the audience watching.