Research: Target Audience Feedback

Target audience feedback is an important part of the process in creating a film. It is used to give us, the film producers, a clear idea of what our target audience will prefer to see in our final production. We presented 15 people, who fit in the bracket of our target audience, with two possible film openings that we have created. They read the openings and the commented on which one they liked the best and what they liked about it. Although this is only a brief survey, it gave us an idea of whether these ideas were good or if we needed to re-think our potential openings. When we did the survey, all the people we interviewed were enthusiastic about the openings and were thoroughly engaged. From this we can tell that these potential openings were a success. We created the pie chart and also a short video of what a few people thought about their favourite opening.

 

 

Research: Pen Portrait Of Target Audience

This is the pen portrait for our target audience. The idea of the pen portrait is to narrow down the qualities of our ideal target audience to who we would like to have watch our horror film. This is a much more specific version of what we envisage our audience to be and it almost describes one person. We looked at qualities like age, social media usage, sports, jobs, family and home life, food likes and obviously film interests. The pen portrait that we have come up with is the one below;

Planning: Possible Film Openings

As a group we have come up with two possible film openings. The reason we have done this is so that we can see what type of opening our target audience will enjoy the most. The aim is to present a group of people with these opening and get their opinion on which they prefer. When this has been done we will have a better idea of what will make our film opening a success. The possible openings are as follows;

Film Opening One

 

• Who: The Psychiatrist that will appear in the film as the main character and villain, and one patient that he choses as one of his victims.
• When: At the middle of the day, in a meeting between the two characters. The victim is a patient of the Psychiatrist so visits him often.
• Where: The two characters are sitting in the Psychiatrists office having one of their regular meetings, the patient is sitting on a sofa with his/her back facing the door with the Psychiatrist sat opposite.
• What: The Psychiatrist is asking the patient questions and recording the answers. After a while, the Psychiatrist excuses himself and walks out of the room. When he goes outside, he picks up a blunt object and takes his shows off at the door to avoid being heard. The Psychiatrist then walks back into the room, stands behind the patient and lifts the weapon - as he brings down the weapon and just before it makes contact with patient the scene cuts to titles.

 

 

Film Opening Two

 

• Who: The Psychiatrist will briefly appear in the opening, but just the character writing in a book or notepad, so the face of the character may not be included due to a lack of importance of any story.
• When: There is no time or date for this opening as it is an opening with no story, but based on the opening titles, like in Se7en.
• Where: Again, there is no story line in this opening so there is no location for the opening, however when the psychiatrist is briefly shown, it will imply that he is in his office even if the filming doesn't take place there.
• What: Like in the opening to Se7en, the opening will be wholly based on the opening titles. The structure of the opening will be a selection of clips of the psychiatrist writing, blood splatters across a page, glimpses of the psychiatrists head collection etc.

Research: The Importance Of Sound In Horror Films

In any kind of movie, music and sound are an important factor in creating an atmosphere for the audience which allows them to explore the film in a lot more detail. The sound of some films are iconic and can be tied to a particular film, and in horror films particularly. The most iconic of them all is probably Jaws, where the composer, John Williams mainly uses string and wind instruments. When listening to the sound track, the speed of the piece gradually increases to build more tension, as you'd expect of a horror film. From this, we expect that something bad is going to happen which is the entire aim of the music. The music builds on fear but also on excitement as we wait in anticipation of what will happen next. This iconic piece of horror music is now used by everyone when they want to symbolise fear or threat, they will hum the tune and follow the same pattern of getting louder and faster as the threat becomes greater. 

Another major soundtrack in the horror film industry is that of Psycho. As opposed to the Jaws track, this one is more exciting from the offset. The creator, Bernard Herrmann uses string instruments which are played at a fast pace to fulfil the fear element of the piece and to leave the viewer powerless and defenceless. The difference between this and the Jaws soundtrack is that this doesn't build tension, it just jumps in at the deep end however they both have very similar outcomes, in the fact that the audience is in ore of what will happen.


On the flip side of this, instead of talking about the perks of using sound in a horror film, what about a horror film with out music and sound? I watched a horror trailer the other day as part of this research and muted it to see the effect and the feel of it was completely different. Just watching the trailer itself is not enough to build up the adrenaline inside and bring fear to me. This sold me on how important music is to a horror film and now I am focused on producing a good piece of music for my opening to really bring out the horror element of it.

Research: The Importance Of Opening Titles

The opening titles in any film are used to present information to the audience and can also set the tone of the film like in the opening of 'Se7en' where the opening credits present a very eerie feel with the scratchy text font and the dark and creepy background. Apart from setting the tone, the credits also present the audience with initial information that may be found important by the viewers and other information that the film company find important, even if the viewers will pay full attention. The opening titles of a film are more to the point than closing credits. The opening credits include key information, for example:

• Film's title
• Film production company
• Distribution company
• Actor's names
• Director's name
• Producer's name
• Music by…
• Cinematography by…