Target Audience Research

As part of our target audience research for our thriller film opening, we decided to go round our school and 'interview' different people of various age groups and gender to get a varied and better collection of answers and opinions, non-biased. We each took it intern to ask different people the same questions. We wanted to use the same questions otherwise we wouldn't get fair results - we wanted different answers for the same question as it would be easier to identify strengths and weakness for those questions and it would be easier to evaluate different opinions. We didn't want to use leading questions but instead use open answer questions so the 'interviewees' could gave a full independent personal answer. The questions were: do you watch thriller films?, what is your favourite narrative? (we had to sometimes describe to our 'interviewees' what a film narrative was and give examples), what is your biggest fear?,  what is the scariest age for a villain?, what gender do you find scarier in a villain? and what is a scary location?. Although these are good questions which cover a range of aspects for a film, looking back at it, it seems that the questions may have been a bit horror-film-orientated. Thriller films aren't based around scaring and putting fear into the audience, instead emphasise mystery and leave the audience questioning. Evaluating the audience research video, I would say that maybe we should have used questions which were more thriller based such as: what is a mysterious location?, what do you find mysterious and eerie? and just simply - what gender is best for a villain? In addition, if the 'interviewees' had answered yes for the question "do you watch thriller films?" then they would have possibly understood questions which would have been more thriller based e.g. what gender is best for a villain in a thriller film? and get their views on what is best for a thriller film (considering that they watch thriller films). Like I said, they are still very good questions and we did get a lot of great answers and feedback from the people that we 'interviewed' which made our research much better. Also, because we asked teachers as well as students, we were able to get a mixed variety of answers from different age groups which made the research better as well. Although, sometimes some of the students we interviewed didn't actually give an answer for some of the questions due to maybe the other 'interviewee' talking over them or they literally didn't have an answer. We still got a great bunch of answers, and the gathering of our target audience research was a lot of fun! The video of our target audience research can be seen below.