AS Coursework Reflection: Research and Planning

What audiences did you look at? How did this inform your thinking about your media production?

We looked at typical audiences of horror films to inform where we needed to aim our film. By looking at typical audiences, we were able to incorporate ideas which would attract and please certain age groups and genders, for example, our film was aimed at teenagers, which is why we intended to use props like the phone, in order to ensure the audience could relate to the characters. We also did a couple of questionnaires aimed at our peers, to make sure our film was relatable and targeted at the right audience.

How did you record all the research?

We recorded all of our research on Blogger as a way of accessing it all in one place. Blogger was very useful for this as it meant we could upload images and videos as well as write about our experiences throughout the course. We recorded our research in different ways on Blogger, through videos and pictures - such as for the questionnaires and location research - but also we managed to write a lot about what we planned to do with everything and what we had found would be effective to include in our film.

What primary and secondary research was undertaken? How did it inform the production and how effective were these kinds of research?

We used statistics from other films about target audience and classic genre conventions to make sure our film was targeted correctly. This was secondary research and was effective as it was easy to find and apply to our situation. We created some of our own questionnaires to look at current trends with teenagers. This also enabled us to target our film correctly and these gave us an insight into other teenagers and their likes and dislikes. This was primary research and was effective as it meant we could find our own research and ask specific questions to get the exact answers we desired. 

What quantitative and qualitative analysis methods were employed? How did the results from these inform the production and how effective were these kinds of research?

We created an initial ideas questionnaire right at the beginning in order to see what people thought of our ideas, in which we counted up how many people liked certain ideas about the film. This was quantitative research as it followed numerical data and was effective in showing us clear percentages of the favourite and least favourite ideas. This influenced the types of things we used in our final film, as we wanted it to appeal to this type of audience. We also created a questionnaire as part of our evaluation at the end of the year. This was qualitative as it used a more traditional market research approach to find our what lifestyles people had and what things they liked. This was effective as it gave us clear answers about people in our sixth form who would be a part of our target audience, by asking more open-ended lifestyle questions.

How effectively were storyboards/shot lists/script followed?

We made sure to follow our plans quite carefully. We didn't have much of a script as most of the opening had no dialogue in it, however, we had some idea of what we wanted certain characters to say and we kept very close to this original idea. Our storyboard and shot lists was very important to us as it outlined our combined ideas, however, we faltered a bit from these as we might have found better ways of filming on the day or location changes meant we had to edit how we were originally going to film the shots.