Research Survey

For our survey, we wanted to gather data from our film's target audience (young adults over 18) to help us make decisions we were unsure about to help shape our opening and tailor it to our target audience. We wrote questions that would help us get a better idea of what our target audience preferred for a horror opening in terms of music and costuming, as those were areas we were unsure on. We also included more generalised questions, to ensure our initial ideas for our opening would be attractive to our target audience.  

Our Questions:

Our first question made focus on the general theme of our film, and the certain aspects of horror it might include. We wanted to know how best to organise our time- whether we needed to prioritise SFX to fulfil the target audience's wish for gore, or to focus more of our time on post-production editing to create satisfying 'jump scares'. 

We had a strong idea about how we wanted to characterise our 'victim' character in the opening, but wanted to ensure that it would be well received by an audience. We wanted to see if our target audience would agree with our idea that our victim should be neutral, and representative of the entire audience. 

We were extremely unsure as to what music we should use in our opening, as we wanted to play to the stereotypes of the supernatural genre without exaggerating them too much. We felt that getting an audience's opinion would help us make decisions on music. 

We had fairly solid ideas about the characterisation of our supernatural villain character, and thought that opinion straight from our target audience would help us to shape our final decision. 

Each of the themes listed will feature in our film, but we wanted to know which of these our target audience would find scariest- so that we knew which we should exaggerate to make our opening scarier. 

We already included a question about the victim earlier in our survey, but wanted a more definite opinion on how she should be characterised and how the audience should feel about her death. 

This question was a development of the previous one, so we had a fully formed idea of how our victim should be presented and received by the audience. 

Finally, the main aspect of our opening we were most confused about was the lighting. We were very conflicted about whether our opening should be dominated by dark, low key lighting to fit to the conventions of the supernatural horror genre- or whether we should use natural daylight to create realism and false security.