Our Horror Title Sequence - Audience Research

Interviews

This is a video of some interviews that our group filmed, it is mainly based around horror films and the horror genre. We asked mostly the same questions as on the horror questionnaire that can be seen below the video on this post. Our group made this in order to show the range of ages and different types of people to which we have asked questions about horror films and the horror genre which is what our final production will be based on. The Interviewees ranged from child to adult, and their opinions were also quite different for some questions.




Handouts

The First Draft of our handout surveys was basic and contained some errors, for example repetition of the same question and some spelling mistakes. It can be seen in the image below. It is a widely open answer one as opposed to a yes / no survey. We will be able to collect data that is more useful as we can see into that person's situation and what appeals to them about horror films. The use of the graphic blood, red, black and white colour scheme and the vignette add a horror feel to the survey giving the person who is filling it out a more horror references so it is easier to remember things they have seen, thus giving us more reliable data to work with.

Here is what the  final paper surveys that we handed out looked like and after completetion from college students.



Online

Below an example of our internet published version of the survey can be seen.



Our Results (as of 20/11/2012)

 The image below shows the spreadsheet in which our results from our online survey were collated and the results from the paper hand out sheets were inputted. I added conditional formatting to the cells in the columns B and C to make it clearer to read. If the gender of the person is male, the cell turns automatically blue, and likewise with pink for girls. In column B I have set it up to turn green for people who's age is within our targeted audience, yellow for the ages who are borderline and red for the age groups who we aren't specifically aiming at. All of this is changed automatically by a formula when the data is entered.

Age & Gender

The first question we asked was to gather information about the age of people who watch horror films, and with that the second was to find out what gender our audience are. The image below shows the most frequent ages that came up and also shows a pie chart of the gender of people who completed our survey. The numbers for gender are roughly even, as we tried to get an even balance of results.




Genre

After finding out the age and gender of our survey applicants we then questioned which sub genre of horror they prefer, these results can be seen below. We collected them into a bar chart as this is the easiest way to compare and see which is the most popular.
It was clear to see that Psychological Horror was by far the most popular so we decided to base our narrative around this.

Frequency of Watching Horror

For this question, selecting a time period was difficult as some people may watch a horror film very very rarely and so of course this wouldn't cover for them, however we decided to use a weekly base as we made sure that the people who we asked to fill out our questionnaires actually did watch horror films.

From our data we gathered it is clear that the vast majority of people who watch horror films watch about one per week. So from this we realised that to make sure people would watch our horror film we needed to make the first two minutes of our film enticing as the first few minutes of a film often determine how action pact it will be later on.

Actors

We then went on to ask about the audiences preferences on actors, in which we gave a multiple tick box selection option (so one participant could enter more than one character preference) and it shows that male characters, who are adults are the most preferred. This was the inspiration for the choice our main actor (Josh).

Favourite Horror Films

We then decided that asking what peoples favourite horror films were, to give us an idea of what sort of storyline is most preferred, and the SAW series off films were the most popular. We included similar torturous features as seen SAW films (for example the cut throat razor shots in our introduction and the strapping down of a man).

Setting

When we questioned what peoples favourite horror setting was, we mostly got the response that houses and abandoned places were the most popular. So we decided that we should combine them to make an abandoned house part of our setting (in the shot where the man is being strapped down). We have also used our data here to decide where our flashbacks are going to come from (where the character will be when he is having them) and that will be an unused tunnel that looks misused and old with grungy walls.

Credits

Although the majority of people by 5 prefer the credits separate to the footage at the beginning (so for example at the end of the film) we had to consider that a lot of films have their credits separate to the shot footage and we decided that in order to make our horror film different from the majority we would integrate our credits into the flashback.

Sound

From collecting this information about sound, we have decided as a group to use a quiet and creepy music track (in which we will build and layer ourselves) as this is the favourite choice among our target audience. The use of this quiet soundtrack will create suspense and in use will false climaxes will be very effective in gripping the audience.