Audience Research - Survey

As an additional part of audience research I have conducted a survey to find out what my target audience think makes a good opening as well as to see how well they may be able to relate to the story.

I had 11 participants taking part in this survey.

You will see the questions in the link below and further down the results and feedback I had, in a later post I will talk about why I asked these particular questions, feedback, how it relates to what I'm doing and if I will change anything because of it.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CDTWQT5

The first question was 'What are your opinions on curiosity?', the options for this were

• Its a good thing (blue)
• Its a bad thing (grey)
• It can be both good and bad (green)

27% believe it is a good thing and 73% believe it could be either good or bad, leaving no one thinking it was solely bad.

The second question was 'What, do you think, is the best way to entice an audience during a film' with the options being

• Using emotion (dark blue)
• Using mystery (bright blue)
• Using tension (green)
• Using none of the above and instead being light-hearted (grey)

As you can see, no one thought being light-hearted would entice them as the audience, instead they believed using mystery was the best way with 73% choosing that option, followed by 18% who thought using tension would entice the audience along with a following 9% choosing emotion. These can be mixed e.g. a mysterious opening would incorporate emotion through performance.

The third question I used was 'What do you think, is/are the best ways to open a film' with the options being

• Using music to portray mood (dark blue)
• Using a voiceover to tell a story using both tone and dialogue (light blue)
• Going straight into the story (green)

55% believed using music is the best way to open a film and set the mood, 36% believed a voiceover telling a story through dialogue and tone is the best way to open a film and finally only 27% believed the film should go straight into the story.

The fourth question was a multi choice question 'what do you think makes the most effective opening?', however only 14 boxes were ticked meaning a maximum 3 people chose more than one answer, the options were as following

• focus on only one scene (dark blue)
• have different scenes but make sure they're all relevant (light blue)
• an introduction moving slowly into the story (light green)
• having a lot of insight into the story (white)
• having a bit of insight into the story (grey)
• not having much insight into the story (dark green)

starting with the focus, a small 9% thought the whole opening should focus on one scene only, 18% believed there should be a lot of different scenes but all relevant, and the majority; 45% believed there should be an introduction moving slowly into the story.

0% believed there should be a lot of insight given into the story, 9% believed there shouldn't be much insight given and 45% believed there should be a little bit of insight into the story.

Finally, the last question was 'If a monologue is used, should it take up the entire opening or only some of it?'.  34% believed that yes it should take up the whole opening with the majority of 64% saying they think a voiceover should only take up some of the opening.