Audience Research Results

This week we as a group have come up with a questionnaire that will help us to create an opening of a psychological thriller. This way we are able to find out about what our target audience (15-18 years old) would prefer to see in a psychological thriller, and what would interest them. We have come up with a set of questions that we will all give put to our groups of audience, and two questions that are different from my group members. The two questions that I have are "which of these most makes you think of a thriller?" this is a closed question so there are options which are from the conventions of a thriller. The second question is "which do you think is the best way of advertising?" this is an open question, so the audience are able to give their answers in detail. I have chosen to do random sampling of at least ten people.

Below are results from some of the questions that will help us as a group to create an opening sequence of a psychological thriller. I have presented them by using pie charts and bar charts.

The pie chart below show what the audience thought of the following options from the conventions of a thriller, most makes them think of a thriller. We had decided to ask this question to help put together the treatment of out opening sequence, and also what we should take in account when filming.


Form looking at this pie chart the four top options that the audience had chosen were 1-sound, 2-setting, 3-psychological problems, and the 4th being lighting. The bottom two were music and clothing. We are then able to use the most the most voted conventions of a thriller to create an opening sequence. This is because we would like to make an opening sequence that will attract our target audience.


The second pie chart answers "how do you find out about new releases through the media?", which was an open question.


From gathering this information, most of the target audience find out about new releases by television adverts. This would help the group if we were to advertise the film to our target audience. This also shows that they mostly watch television, and are also on the internet during their free time. the pie chart also shows that 15-18 year old people do not really listen to radio, that would not really be the best way to advertise and promote the movie.



One of the other questions that I had asked the target audience was "what do you think is the best way of advertising a film?"


From looking at this bar chart, our target audience think that television adverts is the best way of advertising a film. Some of them also gave reasons why they think so, these include that it will reach a lot of people in a short amount of time, even though it costs a lot it is still worth the expense. Three people said that cinema would be the best way of advertisement. This is because they may be going to the cinema to watch the new releases.


Other information that was gather from the questionnaires was type of genres interest them. A vote that I was very pleased with was that the target audience do prefer to watch psychological thrillers, which will make our production easy. We will be able to use the techniques that are used in psychological thrillers to create the opening sequence of our psychological thriller. The one with the most votes was comedy, as our production is to do with psychological thrillers, it would be hard to include a bit of comedy.

Overall, the research that I have gathered will help our group to create a psychological thriller. We as a group are able to understand what are target audience are interested in, what they look out for, and what techniques interests them in films. From this research we have learnt what females and males are interested in and also what we will have include in our psychological thriller to target 15-18 year old audience. We will include the conventions of thrillers that they recognise and also try to use some other techniqeus from the conventions of a thriller.

Product Reseearch

For my product reserach I will look an American pyschological thriller called Fight Club which is about a young man who suffers from insomnia and starts a viloent ckub aimed at rebuilding society. I have decided to look at the ending of the film because it ends with the same scene from the begining of the film which is when the narratore of the film finally figures out along with the audience that he has created a character up called Tyler Durden and his isomnia is to blame for his illusions.
Below is the clip which i will analyse so that it will help me get ideas that i can use to make the opening of my thriller better and also it will help me get tips on some techinques which i could use in when it come to filming my own opening thriller sequence.



My main focus will be:

• Lighting
• Editing

During the scene the unknown narrator and Tyler Durden are in an alinated place and the use of lighting is very dark this bulids up psycholigcal tension for the audience as it implies that it is the end of the protagoinist journey through his thoughts and the audience will no longer be confused. This is an idea that I think will work with my thriller because my main character is going to be shown to be problimatic and so having dark lighting adds to that as it shows her confusion. Also we are thinking of having my thriller in reverse order so that the ending is at the begining which will confuse my audience, as they will think its the end of the characters journey in her headm but its only just the start. Furthemore the lighing be dark may suggest to the audience that it symbolises the characters pass and adds to the confused state of mind, because there preplexed and only just begining to realise who they are and what they have done.

I will now focus on the editing in the final because it is the most emlematic as its when the main characters, finally recognizing that he is in control. This shown through fast editing emphasizing to the audience that he has realized he has been sharing the same body as Tyler. The audience get the full effect off the main character shotting himself in the mouthm without killing himself, as the editing goes in to slow motion and cross- cuts to the illusion of Tyler who collapses with an exit wound to the back of his head.

With the editing in my own thriller we will try to use the same techinques of slow and fast editing. For example i will the editing be very slow paced to show that the girl seem quite normal and inocent and then once her state of mind takes over and she become problimatic the editing will turn fast emphasising her confusion as to no knowing who she is. Also with the cross- cutting we may use it show there is two sides to her character and also maybe to show flashbacks of her pass as this will confuse the audience which is the effect that pyschological thrillers are meant to have until the narrative is resolved at the end.

Fadila Kara

Audience Research

In order to create the opening sequence to my thriller I had to do some Audience research to find out what interests my audience in terms of the thriller genre and also what types of elements we will have to add or change to the storyline of my thriller for example: what type of characters they prefer and what things put them off from watching films. So we created ten questionnaires and handed them out to five boys and five girls who were 15-18 so that we could get a range of opinions and ideas.
Below is the feedback that we received and I have created charts so that it is clearer to me to be able to understand what interests our audience:



This pie chart showed us that our character will be problematic which quite a typical convention of psychological thrillers is. However the pie chart also shows us that some people want both to have an understanding character so they can relate to them, but problematic which will be quite challenging however initially the main narrative for my thriller was to have a normal teenage girl but then she does become illusion, so that my thriller will be about finding who she really is.


The next Pie chart shows how often the people who took the questionnaire watch films. From this we learnt that the majority of 15-18 year olds watch films on a weekly basis therefore if we was to promote my thriller we would advertise it weekly so that our audience will not miss out on seeing the trailer for the thriller. It means it will be easy to promote to our target audience and other audience who would interested in watching it because would be able to promote in public places where people are likely too see it.





One of the main questions that we asked people to answer was regarding genre in particular focusing on what genre interested them. We asked this question because we felt that it would help me know what element to bring from other genres in to my thriller.










From this we I learnt that 15-18 year olds were mainly interested in the romantic genre but also enjoyed watch Action movies. This showed us that with my thriller we will now have element of romance which will appeal to a young female audience. If she is young and in love but also has loads of problems a female audience will feel they will be able to sympathise and relate to her.
However we will try to include bit of action so that our thriller will be able to appeal to a male audience as the action in the characters life will make her/he even more problematic.
However with the action it will be quite minimum because its two minutes of an opening thriller sequence we don’t want to give so much away but we also want it to be quite action packed so that it obviously draws the audience in.

Preliminary Task

The task required us to produce a piece of film in which a character :

• opens a door
• walks across the room
• sits down in a chair opposite another character
• exchanges two sentences of a conversation

When we first began storyboarding for the piece we asumed that it would be easy to shoot however after drawing out at least six of our shots along with the dialouge we found it to be difficult as when we did start filming we found it hard to find a location around the school where lightining would not effect the scene. We filmed three of our shots and then begun editing this was very challenging as we realised that some of the scenes thats we had filmed were not acurate within angles for example our over the shoulder shot was not clear enough because the camera was not steady.

so we re- filmed certain shots and rephrased the exchange of dialouge . This time we found that it whent well and were pleased so we edited it trying to put the shots together which finally ended up being in place and overall as a group were quite happy with our final piece. #

Fadila Kara