How we used our audience research in our thriller opening

In our first audience research i found out how people identify if a film is independent or mainstream. I showed each person the "London to Brighton" trailer and the "Kill Bill" trailer and asked them which one they think is independent and why. Most of the answers said because the independent trailer looks more authentic and there are no well-known actors/actresses or well-known locations. For our thriller opening Alice, Dan and I applied this to our thriller by using an authentic feel to it. The most recognisable feature is the snow. We used the snow very wisely in our thriller to create the realness we wanted.

In my second part of the audience research task I asked a handful of friends and family members where they find out about film releases and how they view films. I always had in mind during this question of the audience research task that a lot of the public view films and entertainment through the internet so i had to think about who i was going to ask regarding the persons age and gender. I feel like i recieved a good general response from all ages. I gradually realised throughout this task that the people who are older seemed to have less knowledge on where to find films or whats a good film at the moment. The younger ages told me that they know exactly where to find the film they wanted to watch on the internet. Could this be because of the lack of the illegal piracy? the consequences of the illegal downloads is too easy to avoid. For our thriller film we thought about making a advert as if it was a real film being shown at a real cinema. We collected our audience research results and tried to apply the most important parts to our thriller advert. We then realised that what we were planning on taking on was too much as well as filming the film and editing the piece so we abandoned the idea of advertising our thriller opening.

The next part of the audience research was to find out the audiences expectations of the sub-genre: Crime thriller. I asked three different people, two males and one female. One male who is aged 18 replied that he would expect guns and violence to be in a crime thriller. This can be seen as a traditional male response however without guns and violence the crime thriller would not be a crime thriller itself. The other two answers were somewhat similar, they both said they like thrillers that have twists and leave the audience in suspense. We made sure we applied these things to our thriller opening. We used guns and violence in our thriller when the femme fatale "Eve" is shot unexpectedly. We used many twists when we shot our femme fatale and we left the audience in suspense when "Eve" opens her eye at the end of the opening.

Another question I had to apply was "where would you expect a crime thriller to be set - inner city, suburbs, countryside, isolated, hi-life or low-life" each person replied with a similar answer which was either "inner city" or "low-life". Me, Alice and Dan immediatley decided that we had chosen a good location for our thriller. One answer said that "crime thriller are mostly always set in inner citys to show distortion" I agree with this as it shows great understanding of the thriller convention.

My final piece of the audience research was "what do you expect of the femme fatale in thrillers" each person said they expect the femme fatale to be alluring and seductive. We applied this to our thriller as our femme fatale is glamorous and elegant. Somebody also said that they like it when the femme fatale stays alive because is creates tension throughout the film. In our thriller film we made our audience believe that our femme fatale "Eve" was killed to create one twist, however we made another twist on top of that and showed that our femme fatale wasnt really dead. This created a suspense to our opening.