Research Into Target Audiences

There are many things to take under consideration when choosing the correct target audience for the film. I had conducted a survey/questionnaire to help get a better understanding of the target audience we are aiming for.

This is the beginning of our survey

This is the link to my questionnaire https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/X2XTDTX

The first thing to consider is the gender, Male or Female?

As we are doing a trailer on the horror genre, In my opinion I would want to target our film trailer more to males as they are stereotypically known to like more gory things and be more manly, than females. However, it is most likely to be a mixed gender genre as it depends on their preference rather than their gender. From the questionnaire that I had conducted, it had proven that gender does not affect anyone’s preferences when it comes to film trailers as there are mixed results.

Age is probably the most important when choosing the correct target audience

We would want our film to be relatable to our audience, this means that using actors our own age and having a plot similar to a real life teen situation. Also, before I had made the questionnaire as a group we did some research towards ages, and we found that the most common age to watch horror movies are aged 15-25 as they enjoy being thrilled. After making the questionnaire the results had shown that our research was true, out of the 14 people that have answered my questionnaire, 10 of them where age 16-18. This means that most of our audience would be similar age to us, making it more relatable for them.

Another important thing to take under consideration is how often people watch horror films/trailers and how much they are interested in them.

The questionnaire helped massively when we got to this question, as we could not predict what the results would be due to different people’s likes and preferences. Firstly, the third question to our questionnaire is “How often do you watch film trailers?”. We had a very mixed response, the majority had chosen ‘less than once a week’, however, the answer with the second highest was ‘everyday’ which meant that some of the people that we had asked are very interested in films meaning they would be the perfect target audience.

Finding out how our audience watch trailers will help us understand what is the best way to advertise our trailer.

Getting the word out to the public is a massive part of success in the film industry and there are many ways of doing this. Using different social media websites is a popular method of distributing the trailer to audiences. ‘YouTube’ was the most popular as 85.71% of the people had this as their answer. I think this was the most popular choice as it is the most well known website for watching any type of videos online, which allows anyone to upload a video and anyone to see, this is also what makes it a good place for advertising trailers. We also asked the audience what technology they use when watching trailers. The most popular response was ‘Mobile Phones’. Mobile Technology has become a popular thing of our generation, the most popular and well known examples of smart phones are iPhones and Samsung phones. These phones mean that they can watch anything wherever they are, meaning they can share various media files with each other.

Another thing we asked in our questionnaire was what their favourite horror film was, this was to find out what people like about horror films so we could take some advice and perhaps adapt into our own trailer.

We asked them why they liked the films so we could see any patterns and recurrences, this helped us a lot as it would help us tailor to our audiences. We had a range of answers, from detailed responses of peoples opinions to simple responses. The most recurring response was that they enjoyed the film because they’re scary and that they liked the storylines.

Basic Equipment Used To Make Films

To get an idea of how other filmmakers/production companies would create a film and/or trailer. I wanted to look at the equipment used and how that would affect the process of production. Equipment is a big part and without it you would be able to have an end project, this is my reason in wanting to do a little bit more research into it.

http://www.desktop-documentaries.com/video-production-equipment.html

This web page helped give an idea of how a beginner would start from the bottom and then build up to become a better filmmaker. It suggests a basic list of equipment which is needed to create a film.

Once reading this list I saw that there was very basic necessities to filming that everyone needs such as a video camera, the quality of camera will depend on the budget. However, this is something we will need to consider before filming, this is due to us not having any budget meaning we will need to borrow one from either the media department or any friends we have.

Then there was equipment such as a tripod, this is also necessary when filming as this would make the footage look still and professional. Although in some horror films they use the camera handheld to make it look like you are viewing the film from the characters POV giving a more realistic feel to it. On the day of our filming we will be using a tripod to stabilise the clips at the beginning giving a more safe feeling to the trailer. However, at the end of the film it is a possibility to consider not using a tri-pod to give the audience a feeling of uncertainty.

Lighting is another consideration, on the website it gives a range of lighting equipment techniques such as a camera light, a three point lighting kit and a light reflector. Lighting is a good method to fill any unwanted shadows and will help to give a more clearer image if filming in a low key lighting location. Once again we have the same problem of not having any budget, thus creating another thing to consider before filming.

Finally, the page suggests many little accessories to think about having when filming such as microphones, earphones and any extra equipment such as batteries or memory cards. Little things like these can make a big difference to the performance of filming on filming day just so that we can ensure that we have no problems to set us back and we can keep up with time management and continuity.

Choosing the right genre

Before making our trailer and doing further research, we would need to choose a genre for the trailer. We asked people of our age range (16-18) to answer a simple question “What is your fave genre?”. The picture above shows our results and out of the 29 people we asked the most popular genre was horror. We had a group discussion to confirm that this was the best thing for us to do and now we will be carrying on with our research, basing it on horror movie’s and trailers.

Editing Terminology

To better our understanding of our terminology, Skye and myself looked at the different types of editing so that we could use them when it came to editing our own.

editing-terminology

Conventions Of Film Trailers

I have made a PowerPoint Presentation to show the different conventions that are used when making film trailers. This helps us identify different aspects when we begin to create our trailer, more specifically in the editing stage. conventions-of-film-trailers

Conventions of Film Genres

This is some research that I have collected about the conventions of the most popular genres. This will help us decide which genre we want to go with, as well as being useful further on in the study to what we might want to include in the trailer. conventions

History of Movie Trailers

I have created this prezi to show how movie trailers have progressed over the years, this comparison between the years helped me understand how they have improved over the years and what makes a trailer good in this modern day time. history-of-film-trailers