Audience Research - Questionnaire

Audience Research - Questionnaire

 

To gain an insight into my audience's wishes I handed out a short questionnaire that focuses on which characters the audience would find most interesting, and how the audience would want my film to affect them. These few short questions will offer valuable
help when I plan and create my trailer, as I will know which characters to focus on and what kind of response I want to draw from my audience.

I handed my questionnaire out in sixth form and my parents helped by handing some out where they work. I also emailed some to my brother, who is at university, and told him to print some off for fellow students to fill in, and email me the results. By doing this, my questionnaire will reach a variety of age and social groups. I had 30 recipients.


Here is my questionnaire:

I will be producing a film trailer for my A2 Media Studies coursework and would like to know your opinions before I make my trailer so that I can cater it to the desires of my audience (ie. You) Here is some brief information on my film idea…

The film will be called Rest of Your Life, it is a documentary that will follow the lives of five people, aged either 17 or 18. I’m doing this because there is so much emphasis on A Level grades that no one stops to consider the pressure that people my age are under. I want to offer a unique insight into how it feels to face this kind of pressure, with the prospect of leaving home for university on the horizon. The five characters I am following will be:

·         A pregnant 17 year old

·         A student hoping to go to Oxford

·         An outcast

·         The class clown

·         A college drop out

Please answer the following questions honestly, as this will be a huge help to me. Thank you.

1.       Which character would you like to know more about? (Please circle only one answer)

 

·         Pregnant teenager

·         Oxford hopeful

·         Outcast

·         Class clown

·         Drop out

 

2.       Which character seems least interesting to you? (Please circle only one answer)

 

·         Pregnant teenager

·         Oxford hopeful

·         Outcast

·         Class clown

·         Drop out

 

3.       What effect would you want this film to have on you? (Please circle two options)

 

·         Make me laugh

·         Make me cry

·         Make me think

·         Teach me about the lives of A level students

·         Show me characters from a variety of cultures

·         Shock me

 

 

The Results

This graph shows that the most popular characters were the pregnant teenager (with 10 responses) and the college drop out (with 9 responses). Possible reasons for this are the increasing media interest in teenage pregnancy, with the success of the MTV documentary series 16 and Pregnant. The drop out may have received a strong response as this contains connotations of trouble, which may hint towards a dramatic storyline. The least popular character was the oxford hopeful, with just 2 responses. From this graph, I can see that the pregnant teenager and the drop out are the characters that people want to see the most of. Therefore, I may dedicate more time of my trailer to these two characters, to cater to my audience's desires.

 



The character that received the strongest response here is the oxford hopeful, which ties in with the results from the first question. This indicates that my audience are not particularly interested in this character. I could respond to this in two ways

• Dedicate a very small amount of my trailer to this character
• Challenge the response by giving this character an interesting storyline (perhaps including a plot twist) and showing the audience something that contrasts with their first impression that the character will be dull.

I am more likely to use the first option, as it is already a challenge to fit 5 characters into a 90 second trailer.

Clearly, a lot of audience members enjoy films that draw an emotional response from them, as the "laugh" and "cry" options were the most popular. The "laugh" option was extremely popular, with 17 out of 60 responses. To cater for this, I must include some comedic moments in my trailer. My audience also wants to see characters from a variety of cultures. This is a pleasing response, as my five characters will all come from very different social backgrounds, giving me the chance to create a variety of representations with the costume, props, make up, mise-en-scene, dialogue etc.