Target Audience Research

TARGET AUDIENCE RESEARCH

After conducting research into which sorts of people watch horror movies the most, we have decided that our target audience is a niche audience of men and women aged 15 - 30. For this reason, our film opening will have a 15 rating.

COMMON HOBBIES AND INTERESTS OF 15 - 30 YEAR OLDS (SOCIOGRAPHICS) ...

Gaming

TV (Subscription services e.g. Netflix)

Gym/ Sports

Social Media/ General Internet

Watching Films at the Cinema & Home

Art

Baking

Photography

Playing an Instrument/ Listening to Music

Shopping

Travelling

Youtube

Collecting Our Data:

As a group we decided to create an online questionnaire to gain more knowledge on what our audience expect from the horror/ apocalyptic genre. We choose to do an online questionnaire because we felt that this made it more accessible to our target audience. I also tweeted out a link to it to make sure it got to as many people as possible and also to allow more of a variety of people to answer. Below are screenshots of the questions we asked and my tweet:

To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key.

Questionnaire Results:

We choose to present our results in a series of pie charts as this made it easier for us to see what results were most popular. We will then be able to apply what we have learnt to our planning and decision making.

The results that we got from the pie charts we found to be particularly invaluable because we were able to learn more about our target audience. This meant that we could include things such as the types of activities they enjoy doing the most in our film opening in order to make the character in our film more relatable to them. We were also very pleased with the result on the question about setting, as majority of people said that they would expect the film to have a realistic setting. This was very reassuring to us because it meant that our initial ideas would appeal to our target audience.

As well as asking our audience quantitative questions which are displayed above, we also asked them qualitative questions which required them to give their own personal opinions. We included questions asking about their favourite horror/ apocalyptic film, and their expectations of costume, colours, lighting and sounds. By asking them what their favourite horror/ apocalyptic film was, this meant that we could use this to see what conventions these films have to improve our original ideas. The most popular film was World War Z, so we can use this as inspiration when creating our own opening. The research gave us the response that we expected as the results matched our original ideas; for example, we planned to create costumes consisting of regular items of clothing, the same as what our audience would expect. They also said that they would expect dark colours such as black and also red which we noticed were a convention for our genre. Below are examples of some of the responses we received:

Many people had similar ideas as to what sounds they would expect, with the most reoccurring ones being screams, creaking doors and smashing of glass. As far as background music was concerned, the general opinion was that it should be minor key, varying in tempo and consist of lots of violins. Many thought that this would make it sound and feel more eerie and creepy. A very small minority of people said that it should be completely silent to build more tension however, as a group we thought that this would make our film less realistic so for our sound, we are going to follow the preferences of majority of our target audience. Below are examples of some of the responses we received:

In regards to lighting, majority of people said that they would expect low key lighting because it makes it more spooky and mysterious. A few people said they would expect a mixture of both to distinguish between the good and the bad so we will keep this in mind during the construction of our opening. Below are examples of some of the responses we received: