Primary Research
For our initial audience research we decided to ask young people 5 questions about their film knowledge. It was important for us to do this so that we could get an idea on who our target audience is, and to understand what people expect from short films so we can implement this into our own short film.
What types of films do you watch?
This question gave us an insight into particular genres that different types of people tend to consume and the type of film, whether short films or feature length films. Our research gathered that feature film comedies were the most popular type of film consumed by the selection of people we asked.
Only one person who was a female that we asked said that Dramas were a type of film she watches, however from doing secondary research, we were able to gather that females would be our target audience from a report we found on:
The Correspondence analysis of genre preferences in UK film audiences, which quoted:
“male audience members exhibit stronger preferences for science fiction, action/adventure, and horror films while women preferred dramas, romantic comedies, family films, romances, and musicals”
(http://www.participations.org/Volume%209/Issue%202/4%20Redfern.pdf)
Have you ever watched any short films?
It was important to recognize who answered yes and who answered no to this question as it gave us an idea of which age bracket our short film would appeal to. The majority who answered yes were of the age 18+ whereas the people we asked who answered no were under the age of 16.
What is your idea of a short film? & what would you expect from a short film?
This allowed us to identify whether the people we asked actually knew what a short film was, and from this we saw what age groups actually had a good idea of what a short film actually is. Like the previous question the younger people we asked who did not watch short films didn’t actually have the correct idea of what a short film was. This confirmed to us that our short film would not appeal to a younger audience.
What certain aspects our audience expect from a short film, was important to find out so we are able to implement this into the 5 minutes that we have for our short film. The main points were that it should be:
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Short
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Experimental
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Straight to the point
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Have a start, middle and end
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Have a meaning behind it
Do you prefer feature length films and why?
Everyone who participated in our survey revealed that they preferred feature length films because they kept them entertained, connected with them more, were more interesting and because they are able to get into it more. As a group we have decided to take these reasons into consideration to ensure our audience enjoys our short film just as much as they would enjoy a feature length film.
One of the people we surveyed answered that they preferred feature length films as they are advertised more, thus for our own film it is crucial that even though we may not have the budget to advertise as much as a feature film does, we should attempt to include similar feature film advertising techniques to appeal to our audience.
Conclusion...
From our audience research we have concluded that our short film is targeted at an audience aged 18+, because they are more likely to watch a short film and also because our storyline will also most likely appeal to a more mature audience. Females would be our target gender due to the genre being a drama and also because of the sympathetic element to it; however it may also appeal to men.
Our primary audience research played a key role in helping us decide whom our target audience would be, therefore helping us ultimately on what type of film we wanted to make. Not only did this tell us what age groups were more prone to watching short films, but also what genre of film were their favourite.