Audience Research

As part of this assignment, we did a few different types of research in order to get a really good sense of what our target audience are looking for in terms of creating a coming of age opening sequence. 
The first thing we did was create a survey, which I then went to put online, so that we could have as many people as possible answering it. 

If you click on where my video below, you should be able to see what results we were able to collect from our survey:



From this qualitative data collected by Freya Vincent and I from the target audience of our coming of age film, we have found that roughly 70% of teenagers are familiar with what the coming of age film genre is and that generally these people are female. This is helping to establish who the audience of our film is going to be, along with what we have found out about teens' favourite film genres. The clear favourite film genre of people in audience demographic E is the comedy genre, with others such as romance, drama and action proving to be popular. As this is our set task, whichever opening sequence type we make will be based around the coming of age genre, but for our opening sequence we will include other aspects of the  aforementioned genres in our construction of the narrative in order to engage not only the primary, but also the secondary audience, as much as possible. This survey, along with the findings from our focus group interviews, will be a major influence to our opening sequence, and has already given us a few ideas as to what we would eventually like to create as a group. 

Me and Freya then went on to do an audience research focus group with a group of AS Media students and gathered some responses as to what our target audience thought about film opening sequences and coming of age films: 



As a group we also did some quantitative data analysis to find out which famous coming of age films have been the most successful upon their release. We used websites such as IMDB and other online sources to look at numbers such as DVD sales and cinema numbers, and you can see that beneath, Ella Henley has made a presentation to show the figures and research that she came across: -



And here are the finding's of Becky Moffat's audience research: - 


Learning Comment:

Our audience research has brought me to many conclusions as to how my group and I should construct the narrative of our opening sequence, and the key conventions and techniques we should use to help in actively engaging the audience. For example from carrying out the focus group, I have discovered that the primary target audience of our film prefer having the protagonist and or/main characters established within the first few minutes of the film and so having them in the opening sequence is a good way to help to introduce characters to the audience and help them to understand where they stand with the characters. 
A style that I found to be successful when creating opening sequences is where you create the film sequence with a flow of music over the top, because this idea seemed to be very popular with our target audience and makes sure that the audience can link the audio to the visuals on screen. However, from my own research I think that there isn't enough use of other non-diegetic sound and that in order to create an opening that stands out from the others of this genre, I should use more of these to help engage my audience. This is also a convention used in a lot of Jason Reitman's well-known films, who has been very successful in creating films of the coming of age genre.