We brought the results of our Questionnaires together to establish trends, what our target audience should be and what we should include in our film in order to appeal to them. The analysis we wrote up as a group is pasted below.
Analysis of Data
The majority of people we asked were between the ages of 15-17, this would have influenced the trends of our results as people of this age group have similar interests in films. Looking at our results we will target our product to this demographic.
Also we asked more females than we did males therefore our trends show that the majority prefer the genre of romantic, comedy and action showing stereotypically the male preference. This was backed up by our results, which showed the majority of males tended to choose action as one of their favourite genres. We have decided to develop our piece conforming to the comedy genre, as this was given as a favourite genre consistently, but we are undecided as to which sub genre of comedy to do.
When we looked at the occupations of the participants, it became apparent that the majority of them were students at varying levels of education, and the majority were studying at A level standard. This will affect our product because we need to be aware that typical students are often stereotyped as having low incomes and so their ability to go to the cinema, and purchase DVD’s etc.
By asking their participants about their hobbies and interests, we were able to see that the most popular hobbies and interests for females were, shopping, socialising, and watching TV. Their hobbies appear to be mundane, and so they may be more prone to comply with Blumler and Katz’s uses and gratification theory of audiences needs to escape into the world of film. This could influence our product, as we need to be aware that our targeted audience are more likely to be interested in watching fictional and unrealistic films.
Also the fact that many of their hobbies involves social interaction again fits in with the uses of gratification theory, in which the audience is believed to want to relate and interact with others. The hobbies are quite stereotypical for our participants gender so we should use stereotypes in our product in order that they can relate to the characters. Therefore our product should something that they could discuss, it has to be something they can identify with e.g. realistic situations to their age range and gender.
The majority of students we asked were studying media studies and English. This means they are liable to be interested in films of a fictional nature with a more creative nature. It is also possible that they were more interested ion independent and art house films, however this theory was contradicted by our results that show that the significant majority preferred blockbusters. This could be because the institutions who produce the films because they tend to produce films that they believe will be the most successful and blockbusters usually fall into this category. The fact that 8 of our students said they study media, which was the second most studied subject from our sample. People studying media studies are more likely to be aware of the nature of our questionnaire and so are more liable to be affected by demand characteristics and so are more likely to answer in a way that they believe we want them to.
When we analysed the character types that were reported to appear in participant’s favourite films, it became apparent that villain’s and heroes are the most common. This complies with Propps theory that all narratives contain specific character types, so we should follow Propps theory when developing our piece and include character types such as the hero and the villain.
The question we asked about character types which our participants preferred could have been worded much better as people especially who didn’t study media studies didn’t understand the question and gave us the actors name rather than the characters name. It might have been a good idea to give an example answer from them to model theirs on.
From our second questionnaire we found that when asked who their favourite actor and actress was the majority of participants chose popular Hollywood actors and actresses who star in blockbusters which were of the romantic comedy genre e.g Cameron Diaz, Reese Witherspoon, Britney Murphy, Jude Law and Hugh Grant. Johnny Depp was also a frequent answer given to this question, he has recently starred in a lot of blockbusters such as Pirates of the Caribbean.
Following this we asked the participants if they would be persuaded to make a special effort to see a film if a particular actor or actress was in it and the majority of the participants said that it would depend whether they liked the look of the film therefore we should use stereotypical characters which particular actors portray. This therefore is not relevant to the development of our piece.
Over half of the participants we asked said that they vary their choices of the genre of the films that they view and the minority only viewed films that conformed to their preferred genre. This works to our advantage, as we are free to choose from a number of different genres and still appeal to our audience.
From our results we can see that the majority of people tend to watch a film with an age classification of 15 therefore we think that we should model our film on this, including the same content that is consistently seen through films of this classification.
When asking our participants we found that the majority preferred British Films so we should make our film including the attitudes and values consisting with the British public and popular British films. We can use research from companies such as working title’s films when developing our product to make it more typically British to the audiences preference.
The majority of the people we asked said that they didn’t favour a particular institution suggesting that it isn’t of any particular importance to them however these people we asked didn’t necessarily know which institutions their favourite films were made by therefore couldn’t answer the question appropriately so we should have informed them more clearly.
Looking at the responses about institutions we can see that linking to the hypodermic needle theory the participants that favoured a particular institution also favoured a particular genre. Each institution could inject particular ideas into the viewer influencing their choices.
Some participants however did favour institutions in particular; these could have been the participants who were students and studying media. The two favoured institutions were Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox.
Reflecting on our questionnaire we could see that the question we asked about downloading films wasn’t necessary to develop our product.
