Audience Research

During my initial audience research I used various methodologies. This was to get an idea of what my target audience would want or like to see - for example, we created an initial class poster, which is on the blog. From this we discovered that only 1/15 people in the class would want to a see a graphic, Torture porn-esq movie, so we altered from this idea for our final product to appeal to more people in class. As well as that we reviewed 10 in class Horror trailers, 3 of which are also on this blog - with class opinions on what the like and didn't like along with a score. These allowed us to gauge what our audience would like and wouldn't like to see before production. Finally our focus group screening method, really helped us narrow down and fine tune, what our audience really liked and didn't like - this was during production, which allowed us to make the Final Cut as appealing as possible.





This is our initial class poster, that helped set us on to our final idea.















In the end we managed to narrow down our target audience down to the following:
Age: 18-25
Gender: Male 70% Female 30%
Type of Horror: Action, Gory, Zombie

Though this research helped, it was very difficult to gauge accurately due to Polysemy, which is where various people in the group with have different opinions and wants, and this react differently to what we did and did not include - for example; When the film Stakeland (2010) was shown in class, some people hated it and had to look away during the extreme gore, while others either enjoyed it or were un-phased. Also, we had to try and bring in psychographics into our methodologies, due to Horror fans being reformers and individuals, and thus hard to really appeal to everyone within the group. Even after assessing our target audience, some criticism was still received, some of which I didn't agree with - for example some people in the group criticized our use of "Quick Monsters", I had to go with my own feeling in the end that it was the right choice to continue with them, which, in the end paid off as most of our desired audience enjoyed their use.




This was our first screening, which enabled us to really finalise our audience and their needs.