PLANNING: TARGET AUDIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE

 Ahead of creating our a2 work, Harrison, Jake and I decided to create a questionnaire to send out to identify our target audience more closely. We all undertook this task separately to ensure that we reached as many people as possible. I decided to use Google Forms as the platform to host my questionnaire as I used it in my AS work, and found that it was easy to format both for me as a creator and the people who answered it.

As our group has decided on doing a found footage, paranormal, horror film, we decided to show some trailers and posters specific to the genre of our ideas. This meant that I needed to be aware of who I could send the questionnaire to. As some of the trailers use flashing scenes, jump-scares and gore, I decided to preface the trailer section with a trigger warning as well as an email describing the warning, and a reminder that if the respondent knew they did not like horror, they did not have to fill in the questionnaire.

I decided to format my questionnaire in three sections and a thank you page. The first section looks at the respondent's category (female, 15-35) and an intro to the genre of horror as a whole. The second section looks at three trailers: The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and The Amityville Horror and asks about the effectiveness of certain aspects of the trailers including sound and pace. The third section also focuses on the three films above, however, it looks at the film posters and how effective aspects such as institutional information and colour are used.

 

Upon creating the first question, I realised in my as questionnaire, I did not cater to non-binary identifying audience members and so I reached out to a potential audience member and asked how to phrase it.

I checked previous horror film demographics and the categories were 15-35 and 35 up, so I decided to utilise the same. The other factor to consider was that an audience member may not want their age within it and so I factored in a prefer not to say option too.

This category was extremely important as we needed to know what sub genres for horror were the most popular. We have already decided on our sub genre but felt we needed to see an overview of the genre as a whole to find our target audience.

Within this header I included a warning and a way for the respondent to avoid answering questions pertaining to the trailers to ensure the comfortable experience of answering the questionnaire was maintained.