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.