Why does the film industry spend so much time and

money test screening films to invited audiences or finding

out what audiences like through market research?

Firstly, we know that in this day and age the film industry do spend a lot of money and time on test screenings to audiences and market research. I know that this happens in order for that particular distributor/producer to relate to their audiences and find out what it is that they like. Before making a movie and spending money/ wasting time, these major movie companies need to know if their ideas are liked by the public and are going to sell well. The main aim is to appeal to a mass target audience and include as much of their favorite things in the movie as possible. I have learnt that the target audience for horror movies today is from the ages of 15 to 25/30 year olds. This then shows that the best way to advertise and locate these mass audiences is to use it in a way they will understand; social networking and social media. Successful market research is the key to making any product work, you have to know what your audiences are going to like and what is going to make money. In addition to this, market research also allows companies to know where they stand and fit in the market. DVD, Cinema, Box Office and Netflix are all popular ways of distributing a movie to the mass target audience.

Audiences

The audiences we are aiming to connect with and targeting are 15 to 30 year old male and females. As expected with any films including dolls, we know for this particular film females will be more interested than males. PEARL AND DEAN played a big part in finding out our target audience. As a group we decided to research other films simular to ours such as ‘The Conjuring’ and ‘Annabelle’. Through the use of pearl and deans website we discovered that our target audience was in fact 15-25 year olds and 26 to 34 year olds.

Feedback: Throughout the process of creating our three products, our teacher drilled us into making sure we always got feedback at different stages of the process from our other class mates. The first time we got feedback from our class mates was the first screening of our teaser trailer; this screening included basic clips of what we had filmed for our teaser trailer. No editing or sound was added to these clips. Feedback which we received was positive and most of our audience said we had got the raw essentials, all we needed to do was piece it all together in a professional way. The second screening in which we received feedback was once we had added sound, titles, transitions and filters to our clips. We had also edited most clips and shots at this post. Feedback was again positive however our audiences were confused a bit by the story line itself. This made us look back at the trailer we had created and change some things around, we even reshot some of our trailer in order to make the storyline that much clearer to our audiences. The 3rd and final screening we showed our class mates all 3 of our products together and received again even more detailed feedback of what worked well and what didn't’t. After receiving some negative feedback concerning font we had used in our teaser trailer, as a group we looked back over the titles etc. and made some slight changes. However, most of our teaser trailer was a success and our audience seemed to think so too.

In addition to the last slide, another way in which we gained feedback from our target audience and market research was to use questionnaires in which my group and myself had made.

Questionnaires work really well when wanting feedback from your audience because you can decide to ask direct questions about certain aspects. For example we used these questionnaires to find out what our target audience liked most about horror movies and then chose to include as much of what they liked as possible- this helped my group and I to reach our mass target audience and please as many people as possible.

How did the feedback effect us? One thing our audience really liked after each screening of our teaser trailer and also whilst looking at both the magazine and the poster was the hair, makeup, costume and use of props. They said that we went to great lengths in order to make it look authentic and horror like. This was pleasing to hear and in turn made us work even harder on the editing and piecing together of all three products in order to keep up this authentic, horror like theme. One thing that made us as a group change a lot of our teaser trailer was in fact the storyline, some of our audiences didn't’t understand the way we had developed and presented it, for that reason we made serious changes to our teaser trailer which helped make it better. Overall I think audience feedback, (target audience feedback) is really important because it helps piece together something really good that people want to invest time and money in. In addition, because we have spent so much of our time into making the trailer we see it with a very optimistic view, but by having people that don’t have any attachments to it, we can see it in a new way and make serious changes that we couldn’t otherwise do.