Target Audience Research

As part of our audience research, we interviewed various people in our school to see what they liked in our Thriller film. As opposed to targeting a certain age group, we simply asked the question 'do you enjoy Thriller films' - this meant that we were able to get a further insight also into which age group Thriller films are particularly popular with. Take a look at the video below. 

The concept which stood out for me in this video is the idea of not knowing who the 'good guy' and 'bad guy' is until the end of the film. This is a typical thriller convention, and something which I think we would be able to implement particularly well into our film. Because our final idea is based around somebody coming into someone else's house who appears to be good, I think it would work really well.
Something else which is particularly evident from this research is the fact that people seem to find elderly people the scariest villain. Therefore, as opposed to using myself as the villain, I am really keen to use someone a lot older than me in order to appeal to our target audience.

Additionally, I have also analysed the feedback we received from our Thriller survey which we posted online a few weeks ago. We had an array of answers, but the most popular answer for "what makes a Thriller film scary?" was the idea of something happening to someone that could happen to anyone: something which is realistic and therefore will scare the audience for longer. People also liked the idea of cliffhangers and never finding out what happens, as well as the element of mystery.
Similarly to the Thriller interview video, 42% of survey respondents said seeing an elderly person (particularly a man) as being the scariest thriller villain. This has been such a popular response throughout our audience research and we would be mad to not listen to them!
70% of respondents also explained that they would prefer for the victim to be alone when they are killed, and so we have adapted our narrative to make this the case. They will now be isolated in a  house at the time of their murder.

We have received a lot of really useful feedback from our research and now we have made changes because of the responses we have received, I am beginning to get really excited for the initial filming in a week or so!