Discussion of findings

For my audience research I chose to do a written questionnaire, in which I asked 15 people 10 if them were male, and 5 were female and aged from 16-18, the reason I chose this age group is firstly they are the single biggest audience of people who go to the cinema to watch movies, also I chose it because they were the easiest group to get hold of because I am at a 6th form with 500 of them. I asked them a variety of questions about what components a thriller had in it and what they thought was in terms of sub genres and their favourite thrillers and what words or phrases came into there head when they thought of thriller.
The first question I asked was “What do you expect from a mainstream thriller?” Some of answers I put down for the people to circle were, fast paced, easy to follow plot, slow paced, complex plot, original plot and generic plot. For this one you could circle more than on answer and most people chose the fast paced, original plot, easy to follow and generic plot. From my proposal you can see this is what I predicted as these are the convention for a mainstream thrillers because normally people who go to the big cinemas want to see a easy to follow generic thriller whereas as we find out in the next question people who go to see an independent film normally see it for the complexity and originality of the plot.
In the second question I asked “What do you expect from an independent thriller?” which was the same as the first question but about independent movies rather than mainstream. The results threw up what I expected in my proposal that most people expect an independent movie to have a complex and original plot, but what surprised me was that people did not expect a slow paced independent film which surprised me because I think most independent films are complex and have a slightly slower pace than a mainstream film.
In the next question I asked “What is a typical character in a thriller?” in my proposal I predicted the outcome would be something like strong/deceptive female and a do good male character. But in the questionnaire most people put “weak female” which surprised me because I find in most thriller movies the female is strong and deceptive and often she knows what the man needs to know to uncover the mystery. Some people even put weak male which surprised me even more because I think basically all main male characters are do-gooder and often strong and commanding. Overall there was a wide range of people’s options on characters in thrillers.
For the next question I asked “What locations do you expect from a thriller?” I included what I thought were some generic thriller locations and added some other ones in there that I didn’t necessarily think were generic thriller locations. I predicted people would circle the locations in busy places and also in bleak locations. Most people circled “busy street” and “abandoned house” because I think those two are some of the most generic thriller locations, as some of the answers I added the locations we were planning to use for our thriller such as a “abandoned building” and “farmland” and only “abandoned building” was widely classified by people as a suitable location for a thriller which is where we will concentrate most of the shots on that location. “Farm land” was only circled once but I think it this could be a good thing because I don’t want to make a completely generic thriller with generic locations I want to use locations that people won’t be using.
For the last question I asked “what would you call a sub genre of thriller?” For the answers most of the sub genres were actually sub genres of thrillers apart from sci-fi. So I wanted to know what ones people thought were the most prominent ones out of that, but if I asked something like “what is the most important thriller sub-genre?” then people might think about it a little too much and give answers that are not necessarily what will give me the most insight into the actual good, useful answers that I want to get from this question. What it did throw up is that most people realised that anything with ‘drama’ written after it can also be a thriller sub genre. Most people got the most apparent ones such as “crime” and “film noir” (and most of the people who did media out of the people I asked realised that most of them were sub-genres). Overall this has given me a good insight into peoples expectations of a thriller movie and will help me shape my own thriller opening buy using the my audience research to shaping my thriller opening from the development stages right up until the actual editing of the opening.