Questionnaire

This is the questionnaire that my team and I used to make our survey for the audience research. The analysis can be found here.

Questionnaire was made by all of us on google docs

Audience Research

Production Team

Eman: Director, editor, interviewer, camerawoman
Nour: Camerawoman, editor, microphone handler
Ramsha: Editor, camerawoman, microphone handler
Sasha: Editor, camerawoman, microphone handler

Above is our focus group video. There were a total of six people; three boys and three girls who gave us their feedback. We made three people react to the opening of the movie 'Creed', while the other three reacted to 'Mission Impossible Rogue Nation'. The two film openings are quite different from one another. 'Creed' is a more serious film, whereas 'Mission Impossible' is more light heartedA bunch of different questions were prepared and asked to ensure that we would be able to get as much detail as possible to help us with our final product.

Generally, many of the students seemed to agree with what we had already known; that it was quite usual for males to have the lead role in the action genre, and that there was a need for more female leads to rise. However, surprisingly enough there were some people that mentioned that they preferred it the stereotypical way of females being played as 'the princess', saying that they preferred this order than the one we were thinking of following.

Even though we got such a response, the general vote went to having more stronger female leads which is why my team and I felt that it would be refreshing to break those stereotypes, and decided to stick with having a strong female protagonist. Although there has been a rise recently in terms of strong female leads, many people still agreed that it would be interesting to see one in our film opening.

A lot of things that we had planned beforehand were liked by the majority of our peers. Things such as the pace, the music, the font, were advised for us to use matching the concept of our film opening, which we were already planning to do so beforehand.

A question we decided to add last minute was the one on what type of ending they would have preferred for our film opening. This is because we were still confused as to how we wanted to end it. Out of all the options we gave to our peers, the two that got an equal amount of votes were 'lingering thought' and 'cliffhanger'.

This didn't really help us come to a conclusion as one cannot be done if the other is being used. Also because we had two completely different ways we could end the film opening if one or the other was chosen. At the end we decided to see how our filming would go and then we'll decide on how to end it based on our shots. Nonetheless, it is still quite interesting that both techniques had an equal amount of votes because they both leave different types of effects on the audience.

Due to this focus group we were able to understand more of what the audience would like to see. I was quite delighted to know that most of the things that we had planned were favoured by majority (such as font type and pacing). We did, however make a few changes to our soundtrack plans as many people claimed that soundtrack was something that didn't really effect them as they were too absorbed in watching what was going on.

Film Genre Conventions

Made by me using wordclouds

Here are the different types of conventions presented in the action genre. Since my team and I had decided to use a simple film opening many of the conventions such as stunts, crime, fighting, etc could not be used. However, we did decide to have a backstory in the film opening itself which required the use of quick cuts creating a fast pace. This is because of the presence of flashbacks present in our film.

As the task is only that of a film opening, we didn't really need to tell too much of the story plot anyway. Although we can't have too much action, we still plan to make the story as interesting as possible.

Hopefully, through the use of these conventions, we are able to create an interesting plot for the audience to enjoy as even though our film follows some conventions, it challenges many too, for example, our main protagonist is a female figure in war-not a male- which is something very rare in films. We hope that this challenge in gender stereotypes help our film opening seem more exciting.