Questionnaire - Miss Miller

Voxpop 1: http://youtu.be/8j9n91jS7pg


In order to get a better understanding of what type of things to include in my opening sequence, my group and I carried out a questionnaire answered by an audience consisting of the ages 15+ who happen to also be the target audience for our opening sequence. The questions that were are will be listed below and then discussed accordingly to the results of our questionnaire.

 

We asked 40 people to answer this questionnaire from the age range of 15+. Despite our target audience being 15, we felt that by gaining the opinions of an older audience would help us to deliver a powerful piece of work when our opening sequence was finished and therefore we valued each persons opinions and took it all into consideration. However, the majority of people who answered our questionnaire are outside of our target audience and therefore this may affect our results greatly as we may make decision that may not always appeal purely to our preferred target audience.

In the chart shown below it shows that the majority of the people asked where men, 17 female and 23 male. This makes a huge impact to the results for our questionnaire as stereotypically men are said to be more brave and more able to therefore watch thrillers than women as women are perceived to be weak and scared easily. This means that our results may cause for our opening sequence to be more violent and brutal because the results conclude that there is a high tolerance in our audience being able to watch a more fierce thriller. Therefore my group and I have decided to pay particular attention to females opinions too so that there is an even balance and so that our opening sequence is appealing to both genders of our target audience. For example in our opening sequence we had planned to show the blood of our victim, however, after viewing the results of the questionnaire we felt we would our audiences view into consideration and change this so that the intention of the scene and shock would still be there, but the way in which it will be shown isn't so graphic.

Having looked at our questionnaire, it was obvious that not everyone has watched a thriller because the genre doesn't appeal to them, therefore my group and I felt it would show understanding to these people by including this option of telling us if they had ever watched a thriller movie. By doing this, we was able to clarify the people that would be able to give accurate results based on their own beliefs, rather than someone randomly selecting options for the sake of filling out our important questionnaire that helps us research what our target audience would like to see in our opening sequence of a thriller. We felt it would also be good to ask this to our audience because we want our thriller to appeal to everyone, and change those minds of not wanting to seeing a thriller. We felt by seeing the 5% who had not yet viewed a thriller, we could incorporate ideas that would help engage them and ultimately help our opening sequence be successful.

 By asking our audience if they enjoyed thrillers, it would help us to gather a good understanding of how our audience would feel towards a thriller. If, like the12 out of the 40 people dislike thriller movies, then my group and I would like to include features in our opening sequence in order to make it an enjoyable experience for our audience. If , like 28 out of the 40 do enjoy thrillers then it makes our job to produce a successful opening sequence slightly easier as it means that the audience going in to watch it are more open minded to watching our opening sequence. We plan on making our opening sequence more enjoyable for the percentage that don't enjoy thrillers because we know to include characters that our audience can relate to more, therefore making the experience of watching our opening sequence of a thriller more enjoyable because the characters will be more approachable.

Moving onto asking the next question of 'if you were to direct a thriller, what would your target audience be' contained a variety of results; the purple is for 15, blue is for 12A and green is for 18.We felt that by using this closed question it would help us to get specific answers and therefore would be more effective and easier for us to know what to do when it comes to our opening sequence. Asking this question allows us to get a rough idea as to what kind of thriller we will be making, for example the results show that the most popular target audience is 15 which has been selected by the majority of the people that answered our questionnaire, we can infer from this that by choosing our target audience to be 15, we would get far more views than if we were to target an older audience. However, by choosing such a young target audience, it means we have to be careful as to what we include in our opening sequence because otherwise some scenes could contain things unsuitable for 15.

In the below question I believed this would be an effective, open question to ask. It gives our audience the opportunity to give their opinion into what type of thriller they'd be interested in watching so that we could take inspiration from them and apply it to our work. This means that our opening sequence would have elements suggested by the audience and would ultimately mean that it would engage them and because it is their suggestion, they would therefore want to watch our thriller. Also, by getting an insight as to what our audience enjoys and what they would include in their own opening sequence if they were to make one, it allows us to get a better audience. Our audience selected that the setting of which they would use is a house. Due to this research, my group and I will make sure the main setting is a house, we feel that this would be a strong feature to use as it suggests vulnerability because a house is typically seen as a secure place where people feel safe, so by using a house it shocks the audience and can therefore make them feel vulnerable as most people are able to relate to the safety they feel when they're at home, and for something in our thriller to make them question their security in their own home means that we were able to successfully use the setting of a home to our advantage in order to make our thriller stronger.

To conclude, as shown in the above results, there is a variety of open and closed questions. For example, the open questions used are 'What setting would you personally use in a thriller?', and 'if you were to direct a thriller, what would your target audience be?' We used these open questions as it gives the people asked, the opportunity to voice their own opinion in which we would gather their choice and incorporate into our final product. As well as asking some open questions, we also felt that asking closed questions would be good because this means the answers were specific and straight to the point, ultimately allowing us to gather the results quickly and effectively. Ultimately, doing this questionnaire has helped my group and I to gather interesting ideas and helped us to see areas in which we can expand on in our opening sequence so that our thriller contains shock, surprise and suspense and therefore be successful.