Background Research #6 Target audience

Our film is a spy/action film and the opening sequence depicts this as we demonstrate most of the genre conventions for this film type. For this reason our target audience is male and females but predominantly males aged 12-21.

We will find out what our target audience think of our initial idea by seeing how they would change the idea by a survey as well as the focus group. This research will help to shape the opening of our film so that it will suit both us and the target audience.

The survey results are as follows:

This picture shows that James Bond is the most popular franchise out of the 4 that we have chosen. Mission Impossible is a close second. From this we can see that the audience like films which have more gadgets involved but this may also be due to these 2 being the most popular franchises out of the 4.

This shows to us that the audience are in slight favor of a more action based film which is what suits our current research and is what typical spy films are. We see this as in the films James Bond and Mission Impossible both contain lots of action. 

This shows us that most of the respondents to the survey are aged in our target audience and therefore that the results can be applied to show what our target audience thinks as 80% of respondents are in our target audience. We will also use a focus group to find out what they think.

The gender shows a 50/50 split which means we can make the film so that it can tend to what both the genders want. It also makes the results more valid as there is an equal split of male and female respondents.

The fact that the results show people would rather have the hero revealed later in the film can be incorporated as we plan so that the hero is not established right at the very beginning of the sequence but later on. This makes the audience more intrigued as they will want to watch to find out who the hero is and we also will do this to challenge the genre conventions of a linear narrative in a spy film as we believe it is important that the film is different.

These results show strongly that the audience would prefer a male lead character which is typical of a spy action film, we plan to have a lead male character as it is what the audience prefer and are used to in a spy/action film.

Finally this table shows that the target audience would prefer it if the villain were to be revealed later on in the film. This usually occurs in a spy/action film as the plot needs to be shown to the audience and then the villain revealed later in the film (however we are unsure of if we want to show the face of the villain at the start or not).

With these results we can now edit our idea so that it suits the target audience and we will also edit the idea more if the focus group show that the demographic think the opening sequence should change more. From these results we can see that the film should be more action based and that the lead will be a male character which are what we had already planned to do but we will also probably have the villain revealed later on in the scene or maybe not show the face as the audience would want the villain to be revealed later on. This is also shown in the results of the favorite film franchises as James Bond is the most popular and this is an action based franchise.