Audience Research

To get a better understanding of the audience that our film company would want to aim for I did some market research, this involved me asking questions to various people and use the data to make a judgment. Due to the restricted resources available I was only able to talk to some similarly aged students which doesn't give a useful understanding but could suggest a rough estimate or outline of general trends.I found that the use of social networking was useful here as it allowed me to communicate effectively without face to face interaction and ii am able to complete the research from home, as evidence I took screenshots of the messages i sent out.

The questions I asked were:
1. What is your favourite film genre?
2. What are you top 2 films?
3. How often do you watch films?
4. Where is the most common place for you to watch films?
5. Where do you find out about various films?
6. Do you watch horror films?
7. What is your favourite sub-genre of horror films?
8. What do you like/dislike about horrors?
9. What are your top 2 horror films?

I created some charts to give a clearer indication of what audiences prefer:

This Chart establishes the more popu

lar places for teenagers aged 16/17 to watch

films, i found out that the bedroom or at home were the most popular places suggesting that the majority of the time teenagers will watch a film alone, or with family, in their own time. This isn't directly useful but it can allow us to understand who will be watching our films so we used this to create a film that can be scary, which fits the desire of an individual but as we also made our film appealing to a range of difference market segments it could also appeal to the whole family, fitting in with watching films at home the families would need to be older and have no small children so it remains appropriate but each generation could enjoy it.

This chart can show what sub-genre is the most popular for horror films, clearly psychological is by far the most popular and we used this information to help decide what type of horror we would make. I think the research became useful here as it demonstrates that we would gain more interest creating the psychological horror than we would from other horrors, this can generate higher revenue from sales making the film successful.




This graph shows how many films each gender collectively watch each month, the first pair of bars are about films in general and the next two are based on horror films. Interestingly both genders watch a lot of horrors which would suggest that the horror genre is popular amongst this age group. Also females tend to watch more films in general which could make you think that they are the target audience however when specifying horror films males actually watch more of them so appealing to them should gain more revenue through sales.


From the questions I also found out that the majority of students who disliked horror it was often due to the graphic images that can be considered disturbing, i feel that as our horror film is a psychological horror we do not contain any of that content. This means that our film could still be interesting for the population that tend to dislike horror films, alternatively it was occasionally mentioned that the anticipation and suspense before a scary moment is something that is disliked, this could mean that our film isnt as good for them so appealing to that audience will be dificult to judge.
But for nearly everyone who likes horror films it was said that the suspense is one of the reasons they are so good, so we will definitely appeal to that market.