I have selected a small group of participants all who are 16 years old. In my focus group, there is 1 female and 3 male. All the participants are students at CNS. All questionnaires were filled out in a Media Lesson with Ms Barton or in the free Period following the lesson. This happened in October 2008.
From my research, I have found out that the 3 males all wanted to go to university after 6th form. The one girl wanted to get a job and go to university. When I asked them about how often they watch films, 2 put 1-2 times a week, while the other 2 put once a month. For this question, the female chose one to two times a week and one of the males also chose this option.
Analysing media questionnaire
Here is the pie chart for how people watch films. I can see that all the participants in my focus group watch films by cinema, television or DVD. One person chose VHS as a means of watching films and 2 people chose computer.
When asked how do you prefer to watch films, half of the audience chose with friends or family, while the other half chose both friends and family and alone. I can see that people like to socialise when watching films.
I can see that people are attracted to films by either the advertising or word of mouth. 75% of the survey chose advertising while the other 25% chose word of mouth.
In this question, people chose more than 1 category. 3 out of the 4 people chose action and comedy, 1 person chose horror and 2 people chose thriller. This shows that action and comedy genres are the most popular at the moment.
From this pie chart, I can see how often the participants in my survey watch TV. I can see that 2 people watch 10 hours or more a week, 1 person watches 5-7 hours a weak and the other person watches 3-5 hours a week. The 2 people who watched 10 hours or more were 1 male and 1 female.
In this question people chose more than answer. The question had 4 votes for comedy, 2 for drama series, 1 for sport and 1 for soap opera. The only vote for soap opera was by the female. This indicates that females like soap opera’s more than males. Females prefer Soap Opera’s due to production companies aiming the show with female orientated storyline. The only vote for sport was by a male participant. This shows that males prefer sport more than females. This would due to the male dominance of sport on television and masculinity in sport.
In this pie chart, there were 3 votes for heavy metal, 2 votes for pop and punk and 1 vote for rock, hip hop and R&B. I can see that the subjects in my survey liked different type of music. The most popular was heavy metal, which was chosen by all 3 males, while the only girl chose hip hop, R&B and pop. Girls may chose to like hip hop, R&B and pop due to there being more female artists in this genre such as Rihanna and Beyonce.
When asked about how they listen to there favourite music, 4 people said computer, 3 people said MP3 players, 2 people said CD’s and there was one vote for DVD and radio. This chart shows that CD’s are becoming more out of fashion as MP3 players are used to consume music. This is because they can hold 1000’s of songs and are portable.
In my last question, I asked how often they listen to the radio. In my survey, 3 people said they listen to it each day, while the other person said 3-5 times a week. This shows that the radio is still popular even in the world of downloading of the internet.
Target Research
My thriller film is both going to be filmed and produced in the United Kingdom. This makes it a British film, so this means it would be ideally shown in the UK.
I plan to aim the opening predominantly at a male audience: by the ay in which we aim it in the sun-genre of Crime/Thriller with references to corruption and organised crime. Television shows such as Waking the Dead and Above Suspicion. The deal with the cases of murder and crime that usually take twists and turns before finding the real offender. Also, I think that the target audience would like films such as Psycho and Leon as they both follow along the same line as my production (Crime and murder).
I aim to base my media production opening on the age group 16-30 because both characters are in this age bracket. Also, as one of the characters carries a weapon with the potential kill; this would not the suitable for a lower age group. Although I would like it to appeal to all age groups, this is not possible due to the content in the production. Furthermore, when researching about thriller films in previous tasks, I found out that the 16-30 demographic group enjoyed thriller genre films.
In the target audience, most of the demographic will be in full time education, further education at either 6th form/collage or at university or working. I found this when researching into target audience in other tasks.
The target audiences aspirations and interests vary due to age and gender. They like a diverse range of media because of the wide range of references that I have collected while researching target audiences.
I believe that my research has been helpful in understanding how audiences consume media. I have found out that female like different types of genres because females occupy more of the market. For example, R&B and pop music have more female artist than rock bands.
I believe I could have made this method could be improved by asked more people to complete this questionnaire. This would help to create a more devise and widespread view of the film industry in the United Kingdom.
