Target Audience: Genre Success Research

Aswell as the questionnaire, it was important to research how popular my chosen genre choice was with the general public in terms of in the cinema. For this I used the uk film council website and its 2009 statistical yearbook.

Here I found a breakdown of the popularity of genres in relation to the money made from films released in 2008.

The genre of thriller appeared to not be as popular as I'd thought, with only 28 releases compared to Comedy's 140, and earnt only 21.2 million in gross box office in comparison to comedy's 222.4. But from my Questionnaires I knew that people did enjoy thrillers, so i researched further.

This table however, appeared to show a different story. Based on the amount of money made from the films in the first weekend at the cinema as well as the box office gross, the top two films of 2008 were Quantum of Solace and The Dark Knight, both of which in the thriller genre.




Aswell as in cinemas, the thriller genre appeared to make money in DVD sales. In 2008, 8.5% of DVD sales were of the thriller genre, ranking fourth out of 12 genres in the UK.

From my own research as well as that produced from my own questionnaire, I found that Thriller is indeed a popular genre, with a wide range of interesting sub-genres. The idea of suspense will be interesting to create and therefore my own research has backed up the decision to create my own film opening in the style of a thriller.

Target Audience: Questionnaire

Before even thinking about ideas for the production, we needed to define our potential target audience for the genre of a thriller, and through producing and conducting a questionnaire we were able to get some useful information that would help us create a final product that would satisfy the audience watching.

This consisted of eight questions, first determining age and gender, and then going on to find out exactly what it is people enjoy about thriller films.

When asked why people enjoy thrillers, 9 out of 24 said it was for the suspense, and 7 for the enjoyment, whilst only 5 said they looked specifaclly for a good storyline. From here it was concluded that suspense was not a only a key convention, but was an important factor in keeping an audience interested.

Question 5 asked the audience exactly what it was they expected to see in a thriller in terms of themes. As you can see here from this tally chart of general results, the most popular thematical expectations were murder, crime and combat, with gang warfare also being a popular choice. It was these results that helped us later when creating the idea for our piece.

When asked what kind of techniques audiences looked for in a thriller, 'Tension/Release' was an extremely popular option, just as suspense had been earlier on in the survey and so we were reminded again of its importance. 'Mystery' was also favoured aswell as 'Action Sequences'. The 'Martial Arts' option didn't receive much interest and so we thought we'd stray away from a martial arts styled film opening.

Finally we asked our audience, divided up into categories of 15-21 (7), 22-25 (6), 26-36 (5) and Over 36 (6) what types of characters they enjoyed watching. Although this question was quite specific it was useful when drafting our ideas. From this: Undercover Policemen, Gang leaders and 'The Victim's Point of View' all were equally popular and we took this into account when creating character profiles for the roles in our own film.