Evaluation

Having a target audience in mind when creating a thriller film is very important because it helps you to focus on what needs to be incorporated into the film in order to make it successful. By having a target audience in mind, it makes it easier to question and research what those types of people like, and the data will be more accurate and representative of the target audience. This way, the thriller will be successful within the target audience, as it would include all the conventions they want and expect.

To gather the research, my group asked 40 to fill out questionnaire. We chose this number of people as it would give us a wide range of results. The majority of the people who filled them out were 15-18 (29 people), which is around the age that people start to watch and enjoy thriller films, which means the people who filled out our questionnaires will have some sort of idea about what sort of things are features in thrillers, so our results will be more accurate. However, we did interview 11 people, ages 11-14 so as to get a wider range of opinions. By using a questionnaire, we were able to get a wide range of people's opinions.

Our vox pops were successful because it allowed us to get a slightly deeper insight into people's opinions of thrillers. This was slightly better than using questionnaires because the questionnaires only had a few options and people may not have been able to out what thy really wan to, or may not have been able to elaborate. But when the people were actually interviewed, they were able to express their opinions in more detail. This gave us a deeper insight into what people wanted and expected to see from a thriller film which helped us to realised what we needed to incorporate into our thrillers to make them successful.

One of the questions we asked was 'Which age certificate do you prefer to watch in thrillers?' 28 of the people that answered the questionnaire preferred to watch thrillers with the age certificate of 18. 18's are generally the scarier, more gory thrillers and the fact that most people want to watch that type of thriller shows that we need to include some of the conventions of an aged 18 certificate thriller film. However 9 people would have preferred to watch thrillers with the certificate of 15. This could suggest that although people enjoy thriller films, they don't like them to be too scary or violent. Also, 3 people prefer to watch thriller films that are a 12 age certificate. Through looking at the results from the questionnaire, I have discovered that most of the people who answered would prefer to watch films that are rated 18. This means that in my own thriller film, I have to make it as close to the conventions of an 18 thriller film as I can as this will appeal to more people.

Another question was 'What would you expect to see in a thriller film?'. he most popular thing people expected to see was the convention of villain and victim. 12 people chose this option as the one they expected most. This tells me that in order to stick to the conventions people want to see, my thriller has to have a plot with strong villain and victim characters. Another thing lots of people expect to see is a character with hidden identity and that character is usually the villain. This means that in my thriller, the villain's identity should be hidden, which would create suspense, which is something that the audience would expect to see.  But as this was  very broad question, with only six possible options, these results may not be entirely representative and people may not have been able to answer the way they wanted to.

Another question that we asked was 'What characters do you expect to see in thrillers?' We asked this question because we wanted to know what kind of characters we should include in our thriller to make it the most successful. The results sow that 15 people would expect to see a male villain and only 3 would like to see a female victim. By looking at this, we realised that to keep to the conventions that the majority of people want, so we decided to make our villain a male character. The results also show that 13 people would expect to see a female victim, 8 would expect to see a child victim and only one person would expect to see a male victim. By looking at this we decided to incorporate the conventions of both female and children victims by making our female victim very young, around the age of 15.

By looking at and analysing these questions, it has greatly helped my group to plan our thriller film. Due to the fact that we now know what our target audience would expect to see and would like to see from our thriller, we are able to include all the things that would make our audience enjoy the film. It has also helped us make decisions about the conventions and characters and sounds that we should incorporate into our thriller.

The only thing we had to reconsider was the age certificate of our thriller. Our research shows that our target audience would prefer thriller's with an age certificate of 18, but we wanted our thriller to be a 15. So we then decided to keep the decision to make the thriller a 15, but to make the conventions as close to those of an 18 rated film as we can, so as to keep the audience entertained throughout the film.