Audience Research Analysis

Questionnairres are very important when finding out what to do for your trailer. It gets the best quality response out of any other ways you could find the audience research from.
I felt it is crucial to get an equal amount of female and males to take the sruvey to steer away from being dominant to just one gender. The problem with our survey is that most of the people we were able to get are audience feedback from were actually our friends and people our age, resulting in a substantial amount of people being aged from 16-17 and the occasional parent or maybe teacher, but very few older audiences.
However this just meant that they would be the audience we focused on get our production to be of value to them.
From our audience research we've learnt that the age range will be from 15-18 which made us decide to use younger people for the main actors to make it more convergent. The audience also chose forests as their desired setting which was beneficial because it was already where we set to hold our film.
From our target audience we found that there was a shared response from both female and male. We obviously came as some use because it wasn't too difficult to decide how the production was going to be made. However there were some areas which weren't as easily decided. When is came to the actually genre of the horror, e.g. Gore etc. There were a mixed response about both slasher and supernatural. This made it more difficult to decide what it should be. The reason we went for what we did. supernatural, is because it wasn't as typical as a slasher chasing people down in a forest. We wanted a unique feature to ours, so we decided to, rather than do a supernatural film in a possessed home such as Paranormal Activity, make the supernatural force be outside to scare the audience more,. it would make them feel more involved to the force, rather then feel that it only happens in this 'haunted house'.
The other beneficial concept of a mix responce as it avoided any dominant gender stories. For example it wasn't comletely appealing to just males as oppossed to females, it actually allowed us to open our viewing range in gender terms.
We were able to combine these results in order to create a reasonable production evolving round them. There are many more questions as we decided the more intelligent approach to audience feedback was to branch out with our own ideas and put them together after getting our own responses and these were mine. Some of the questions that were answered were questions like:

'What horror conventions excite you and make you more incline to see a horror movie?'
We had to rely on people with knowledge into horror trailers, like media or film studies students, to give a specific and relevant answer to us. However we did also branch out to anyone we could get the time off, which is why there is a variety in answers. It ranges from the anticipation of the classic horror music building up to something big, or a creepy and calm mentioning of the films tagline 'In space, no one can hear you scream!' But there was a wide response for tracking/following shots, for example in the trailer 'Long Tim Dead' we get put into a point of view shots with the evil spirit and are chasing someone through a corridor. We decided to adapt this to our trailer as it got the largest response from the audience.
Also montages got a very high rating for this question, revealing a lot yet a little of the film in about a 8 second viewing. This is because it reveals to the audience a lot of the movie and makes them ponder more about what they've seen however, it doesn't spolit it so we have decided to adapt this to our film.

For what reasons do horrors appeal to you?
This gave us a very cliche of responses, as the majority were for the 'excitment' or 'thrill' which is what was expected from this question. Although it was still useful because it gave us the ideas to make it more anticipation building. There were some different answers, such as preffered genre to see when going to the cinema with partners or friends for the fun yet scary feeling.

Do you prefer Hollywood or English horror movies?
This was a question we used in order to subtly find out if the audience prefered bigger budjetted films or not with actually stunts etc. or animated. We didn't ask upfront which they prefered because without thinking the initial response would have been high valued ones. The reason for this question is because Hollywood moives are very good and amazing in terms of graphics, but very cheesy and unrealistic, like the films Jason which are about a human man who can take knifes and bullets to the face yet still live. Unlike a lot of horror films from England, such as Eden Lake. Eden Lake is scary because it is very realistic and seems like a slightly potential scenario. Teenage thugs getting out of control and in order to 'cover up' their mistakes they resort to killing.
The response resulted in English Films getting a better rating, so we concentrated on making it more realistic.