Questionnaire Feedback

The results from our questionnaire helped tell us a lot about our target audience. Results from the question about genre preferences showed that half of the 15-24 year olds we questioned favoured action over other genres. This tells us we are aiming our film at the right age group as most have an interest in action. Comedy and romance were liked evenly, with all the people who favoured romance being female and comedy being male, conforming to the stereotypes on those genre audiences

Our second question was about the number of times our target audience visited a cinema per year. Most said between 1-10, which is lower than we expected. Strangely only one of the people we questioned went to the cinema between 11-20 times a year, but three people said they went over 20 times a year. This suggests a lot of this age group watches films through DVD rather than going to the cinema.

Our third questions feedback told us that half of our target audience are likely to spend under £50 on films per year (including DVD purchases and cinema visits) and only 1 in 10 is likely to spend over £100. Not one person we questioned said they spent no money on films, showing that this age group is keen on films.

The fourth questions feedback was mixed, as it was hard to put the question as a multiple choice because there were so many different answers. After grouping our answers together into different categories we found that most of this age group is disinterested in dialogue driven or "clever" films, which ties into the fact that most of the age group enjoy action films. Half the people we sampled were divided into explosions and humour, which meant oddly enough relationships was the most interesting part of films for this age group, which was unexpected.

Our last questions feedback told us that the majority of 15-24 year olds had large DVD collections, with over half of the people sampled owning 41 DVD's or more. Few people owned less than 20 DVD's, which also shows this age groups interest in films and explains why so much money for action films is earned through DVD releases.

Questionnaire

Here is our film questionnaire. We're hoping to distribute it to at least 10 different people and we aim to cover both genders of our target age group of teenagers and young adults in our sample. This will help us find out about our target audience and what their interests are and their level of interest in our genre and different parts of films.

Animatic Storyboard

This is my animatic storyboard. It should give a rough idea as to the planned pace of our shots and the shot types we plan on using. The background music used in this is not the same as what we'll be using in our finished opening scene, but instead it's purpose is to give you an idea of the kind of music we'll be using and when we want background music over the scene. Our films titles will appear at the end of our scene, but aren't in the storyboard. I'm happy with how my animatic storyboard has turned out and think it looks quite professional.

Props

Our opening scene requires quite a few props in order to fit with our chosen genre. These include a crossbow, crossbow bolts, a briefcase, fake blood and a mobile phone. Our main prop, the crossbow and its bolts, will be used by the villain of our film to catch the main character and steal his briefcase. This prop will come from a family member of our group. Thematically, we think the crossbow is a good choice of weapon for our villain, as it makes him seem more violent and anarchic and gives the audience a sense of the crazy personality of our villain. A convention of most film villains is a mentally unstable background, which is represented in many action films such as The Joker in The Dark Knight and Raoul Silva in Skyfall. Mike Myers in Halloween would be another example of a mentally unwell villain, although this is from a different genre. Therefore our crossbow prop helps to give our villain the qualities of a conventional film villain. To let the audience know who they should be siding with, the use of a crossbow suggests the man using it is the villain as it is a particularly nasty and medieval way of killing someone. Production-wise, we also like this choice of prop as it allows us to explore many different shots that a weapon such as a gun or knife would not allow. For example, aside from shots of the crossbow being aimed and fired (which in itself we think is more visually interesting to watch than a gun doing the same thing) we also can have shots of bolts fired from the crossbow darting into trees and this will look especially interesting when our main character gets hit by a bolt





Our second most important prop will be the main characters briefcase. This will contain something of clear importance that is not revealed to the audience in the opening scene, to gain the audiences interest and make them want to watch on. It is the only explanation the audience have for what is going on in the scene, and explains the characters motives for their violent actions. The briefcase itself looks professional to match the main characters business-like appearance. The case also has a lock on it as this gives our villain a reason to force a combination out of the main character, showing his dark personality. Fake blood will be needed for when our main character is hit through the leg by one of the villains bolts. We want it to look as realistic as possible, so will more than likely buy actual fake blood from a joke shop. If not, we can make fake blood ourselves out of home ingredients. We can then stick one of the bolts through the actors trouser legs to make it look like it has actually gone through his leg. The final prop, a mobile phone, will be used only at the end of our scene by the villain to confirm the job is done to an unknown authority.