Audience Review - (Completed by Rizwana Jawid)

As a group we designed a questionnaire to help us understand what the audience like to see in thriller movies and what catches their attention. We thought that by getting the audience’s opinion we would be able to base our opening sequence on the results that we found. Along side the questionnaire we designed, we also handed out our script and synopsis to see what these individuals thought of our idea for the two minutes sequence that we planned to create.

The questionnaire was handed out to thirty individuals, fifteen of these being females and fifteen males. We chose to hand this out to fifteen females and fifteen males to keep a balanced response from the audience and ensure that the results were fair and unbiased.

One of the questions in the questionnaire was asking the individuals who received the questionnaire what target group they fitted into. This was done so we could see the responses of each target group as to what they liked and preferred.

The results show that all the thirty people that answered our questionnaire watched thriller movies. By asking this question we made sure that the responses that we received, would be from individuals who have a clear understanding of thriller movies as this would help us receive a clear opinionated response.

The next question was asking the audience what they would expect to see in a thriller film. The majority answered that they would prefer a thriller to have suspense, keeping them engaged to the film. This was the responses received from 31% of the target group. The second highest option that was chosen was that they would like to see a film that consists of danger; this was 17% of the reply. 15% chose that the storyline of the film was an important factor that they would expect from a thriller film. Death and action received 13% of the votes each. Finally enigma received the lowest number of votes.

We also asked the audience to tell us how they would expect a good thriller film to begin. 50% of them answered that they would expect a good thriller movie to begin with ‘normal everyday life’. 39% suggested that a good thriller movie would start with flashbacks. The other two options that were also written on the questionnaire were ‘chase’ and ‘death’, 4% of the votes were for chase and 7% were for death. As the majority of the votes were for ‘normal everyday life’ we will base our two-minute opening sequence on everyday life.

The next question that we asked the audience was which sub-genre of thriller they would prefer to watch. The majority of people chose that they would prefer psychological thriller which received 44% of the votes. This made it hard for us as the thriller opening sequence we decided to do fitted into the ‘crime thriller’ sub-genre. Psychological thrillers involve elements from the mystery genre and focus on the plot over the character. They also emphasize intense, physical action over the character’s state of mind. Whereas crime thrillers offer a sense of suspense and focus on the criminals actions. Crime thrillers emphasize action over the psychological aspects.

The target group was also asked to comment on what film classification would be appropriate based the script we produced. According to the target audience our script fitted under the 15 classification. Only 40% of the individuals said that the script fitted under an 18 rating.

Finally the last question that we asked the target group was whether the synopsis showed a clear antagonist and protagonist. 100% of the response was ‘yes’ that the synopsis clearly showed the antagonist and protagonist.

After handing out the questionnaire to thirty people and getting their response, we created pie charts so that the results were easily readable. Producing a questionnaire helped us, as a group understand what people expected from a thriller movie and their opinions. It also helped us decide what we were going to offer the target audience through our thriller sequence. As well as this, it also helped us in the planning and production of the opening sequence.