Target Audience Research - Questionnaire Analysis

We asked a variety of people a set of questions about drama. We decided to mainly ask 13-19 year olds because that’s the age group we want to attract. We asked a mixture of males and females so we could get a feel of who likes specific aspects of drama movies.








From this pie chart we gathered that 70% of the people we asked are fans of drama films. This supported our prediction that most people would be fans. This also made us happy that we decided to target 15-17 year olds. From this question we can now go on and make a drama film knowing that the majority of our target audience would enjoy it.

The second question we asked was ‘What do you think is a key part of the drama genre’. We decided to ask this question so we could understand what makes a drama film so popular and from the answers we can decide which aspects to add into our film. From the pie chart we can see that the majority of people think a key part of drama films are conflict and emotion. These are key parts that we need to add into our film to make it appealing to our target audience. When the participants explained their choices they mentioned that these were key parts because it makes a drama film more meaningful and serious. Not many people picked humour as being a key aspect. I think this is because it ruins the dramatic atmosphere and makes it seems less serious which a drama film should be.  A couple of people chose ‘based on a true story’. This is something we could add into our film because my older sister went through a similar situation to our main character.



The next question we asked was about the music and what sort of music they think should be incorporated in a drama film. The majority of people said it should be slowly paced and lyrical. They said that this was because it created a meaningful atmosphere and makes the film overall more touching and truthful, when there are emotional scenes. From this we realised that for our film to be more dramatic and emotional we need to create that sort of atmosphere by adding in slow music that can be relatable to that specific scene and the characters thoughts and feelings. This made us decide to use only a piano and maybe a violin for our opening two minutes.

The fourth question we asked was about the characters. We expected that people would say everyday people and maybe children.

From the pie chart we realised that actually no one said they thought children should be in drama film. This was unexpected and shocked us because we thought that lots of people would say that children should be in drama films. What didn’t surprise us was that the majority of people said that everyday people should be in drama films. Their explanation for this was that it makes the film more relatable to the audience and makes the problems seem more real. We agreed with this and that’s why we chose to use an everyday foster child as our main character that other people can relate to and sympathise with.

Other people said that sick people should be characters in drama films because it makes the film more dramatic and tense. We decided not to add any sick people in our film because it takes the attention away from our main character which we don’t want. We want her to be the centre of the film and have the audience only sympathise with her.

 

We asked where people thought a drama film should be set to get an idea about where we should film our opening two minutes. Nobody said that a drama film should be set in an exotic location. When asked to explain this they said that this was because it makes it less relatable. The majority of people said that a drama film should be set in urban areas, followed closely by rural areas. This gave us a choice about where to set our film because the majority of people said that either urban or rural areas would be fine. We decided to set our film in an urban area. This is because our main character needs to be trying to find her parents in a place where lots of people live and that is urban areas.

Next we asked people to name the sub-genre they most like to be linked in with a drama film. No one said action or adventure, which we expected because it is not very realistic which drama films are. The majority of people said romance. This didn’t surprise us because romance is part of everyday life and a drama film generally reflects everyday life. A few people said that comedy is a good sub-genre for a drama film because it makes the film less serious. We want our film to be extremely serious so we have decided not to add in comedy. Seeing how seriously people like romance as a sub-genre to drama films, we thought that we should add in an aspect of romance. There wouldn’t be enough time to incorporate it in the opening two minutes but if we were filming the whole film we would add in an aspect of romance.

The next question we asked was ‘is dialogue important in an opening or do you think music is just as effective?’ The majority of people said that music was just as and if not more important that dialogue in a drama film. From this we decided to not have any dialogue in our film and only have slow music with a small monologue over the top of it. This would make the opening seem more dramatic and relatable. The monologue is going to reflect what is happening in the scene but not tie in completely.

Overall, from this questionnaire we have realised that drama films need to be relatable to every life and therefore have everyday characters. This is something we are incorporating in our film. This questionnaire really helped us understand what we need to add into our film to make it appealing to our target audience and gave us lots of ideas as to how we should film our opening two minutes.