Target Audience Research

Target Audience Research:

I had to decide on a target audience for my short film:

• age range of 16-25
• both male and female
• middle and working class
• multi-ethnic

I designed a questionnaire in order to find out which genres were the most and least popular. I also included questions to investigate whether people have seen a short film or a noir film. I asked twenty people to answer my questionnaire and made pie charts on Microsoft Excel based on the responses to my questions:
1.

2.

3.

4. All those who participated in the questionnaire were of middle class background

5.

6.

7.

8. What is your favourite film?

The answers varied from comedy films such as Pineapple Express, The Hangover and Mean Girls to Sci-Fi films such as Avatar, Star Wars and the Harry Potter franchise.

9a.

9b. The people who could correctly identify the generic codes and conventions of Film Noir answered the question below.

10.

11. All those who participated in the questionnaire preferred feature films to short films.

12.

From the questionnaire feedback I concluded that comedy and romance were the most popular genres with 25% and 17%, respectively, of those who answered my questionnaire cited them as their favourite genres. This left thriller/action as the 3rd most popular genre as only 6% of those who answered my questionnaire cited thriller/action as their favourite genre. However, when asked on the following question "Which genre of film do you dislike?" only 6% said thriller/action whereas 17% said romance. This leaves me to conclude that although thriller/action is not considered to be the favourite of my target audience it is not the most disliked, which leaves me to infer thriller - and its association with the film noir genre - to be well liked.

I was also able to conclude that short films are unpopular in comparison to feature length films because: they are less value for money, less time for the plot to develop which means there is not a sufficient amount of time for viewers to become gripped by the film, short film less interesting, there are no famous actors.