AUDIENCE RESEARCH

1

2

3

4

I wanted to ask questions that could have more of a stylistic influence on our film. We wanted an aesthetically striking and appealing film, so it was important our audience would react to it in this way. Beth and I had discussed a lot about what we liked in a shot and how we wanted it to look, specifically with the seaside scenes which were meant to be the most striking of the film. I gave out 36 questionaires to our main target audience, teenagers. It was clear that shot 4 was the most popular with 16 votes, something that was reassuring for Beth and I as it was our favourite too. This made us feel like our ideas were also the same as our audience and made us feel that we had our thoughts in the right place. The contrast of the silloutte and the sunset is striking with the sun flares giving it a more ethereal feel.

I think that shot 1 was popular because the bright red made it stand out. It comes across as very unnatural and this means it is less generic, so is favoured as opposed to shots such as 3 that are more common and would be seen as more boring.

I understand that the name of the film is vital to the first impressions it creates. It was harder to get completely appropriate feedback as participants could only generalise. However, it could still show what our audience was most interested in. Before the audience research my prefered title was First Blush as we liked the innocence and youth it portrayed. After the audience research I did see the allure of Adolescence. It says straight away what the film is about, the state between childhood and being an adult. It is very unbiased and clinical, so the precondictioned bias created by 'First Blush' that our character is innocent has been removed.

I thought 'do you enjoy coming of age movies?' was an important question to work out the significance of our genre to our demographic. It was incouraging that 16/22 of the people we asked enjoyed or sometimes enjoyed coming of age movies. That meant 73% of the people we asked. This was a very encouraging result as we felt our demographic would be interested in the film we wanted to produce. We also had to think of ways to keep the other 27% interested in our film, also having elements of other genres or making sure it is branded broadly.

To get an idea of the audiences reaction to our medium of our media we needed to see how many people watched short films at all. For our demographic it is a less recognised platform, which other media such as television, films and radio being more easily accessible. This proved to be the case with 65% people either never or rarely watching short films. However, it was promising that there were still 83% peole who did watch short films, to varying degrees of frequency. This meant that this audience could most likely be persuaded to what a short film they were interested in, as long as we could create this interest.

One of the biggest problems we had was in choosing the name of the short film. We knew this was important as it is one of the first things that grabs your attention about the film, you make your first impressions based on it. To start with our working title has been 'First Blush', however we weren't certain so decided to still ask about a name in our audience research. It was clear 'disintergration' was not popular, I disliked it myself as I thought it was too long to brand easily. It was interesting to us that 'First Blush' didn't poll very well anyway, with 'Dawn' and 'Things Fall Apart' scoring the same. 'The Fall' was a bit mistargeted and dramatic for a coming or age film as it seemed more like a action or thriller genre title. 'Adolescene' was a clear winner, and we started to favour it more. I like that it is very clear and clinical, it has no emotion attached to it and seems very detached, like the main character is. This distant title reminds the viewer this film is just a case study or example that means all teenagers.

Some other names suggested:

Teenage Year - Angry Kid - Trouble - Life's Tough. Period - Teenage Dirtbag - FISH (sort for f*** it sh*t happens) - Despair - Too Many Harmones - Young, Broke and Hormonal - Puberty

My target audience is...

The target audience our product will be targeted to, and will appeal to, will be two different sets of people. This dual audience is quite unique and stems from the coming of age style of film. Although it mainly relates to teenagers and young people recently teenagers (13-21 years of age) it can still reach a wider audience as everyone has been a teenager once. This means that although largely a younger audience, it has more breadth. I also needed to take into consideration the age rating that could be put on my film, especially considering Beth and I wanted to include adult themes such as alcohol. This would restrict out younger audience but could make the film appeal more to an older audience. Our film is likely to appeal to a gender neutral audience but we are using a female lead and the teenage years from a female teenager's point of view, so this could potentially mean our audience is largely female.