Audience Research

1. Primary and Secondary
Audience Survey
Audience Research

2. First of all, we asked participants what their gender was. Doing this gave us information on the gender
breakdown of audiences from different films which allowed us to understand which types of films
attracted which types of audiences. Unfortunately more females than males completed our survey,
making our results partially biased. However, we can conclude from this that females are more likely to
be interested in ‘Coming of Age’ films therefore we should adapt our opening sequence to suit this
particular audience.

3. Next, we asked participants how old they were.
The majority of the people who answered our
survey were aged 13-17 however we also received
data from people aged 18-24 and 35-44. By using
a research group made up of participants from
different age groups, we were able to reach
conclusions about both our primary and secondary
audiences.
As the majority of our participants were aged 13-
17, we were able to learn how we should adapt
our opening sequence to suit them as we intend
for our target audience to be of this age bracket.
Using participants from different age groups
allowed us to understand how we should include
certain codes and conventions to make our
opening sequence suitable for our secondary
audience.

4. Next, we asked the participants what their favourite
‘Coming of Age’ films were. Doing this allowed us
to understand which films of this genre are the
most popular. Films that our participants frequently
mentioned were, ‘The Breakfast Club’, ‘Mean Girls’
and ‘Easy A’. From this, we learnt which styles and
narratives were most popular.

5. This information is useful as we can include some of
the techniques, used in these ‘Coming of Age’ films,
in our opening sequence in order in insure it’s
popularity and success.

6. Next, we asked our participants to rank each
of the film genres (1 being the most popular,
and 8 being the least popular). The genres we
asked them to rank were: Comedy; Action;
Adventure; Romantic; Drama; Horror; Thriller
and Animated. By asking this question, we
learnt that our participants favoured films of a
comic genre and didn’t seem to show a
preference for horror films.
By finding out which genre our participants
preferred, we can now adapt our opening
sequence to suit their tastes in order to
engage our primary and secondary audience.
This would not only make our film more
enjoyable for our target audience, but it would
make it much more successful.

7. Next, we asked our participants what they enjoyed
about films in order to gain an insight into the
preferred codes and conventions of our target
audience. The answers we received stated that they
liked it when there was “lots of comedy and action”
and when there was “character development and
emotional depth” and “good script, believable
characters and a plot that made sense”.

8. This information suggests that in our opening
sequence, we need to make sure that our
audience are able to relate and connect to the
characters. We also need to make sure that we
have a strong narrative that is clear to the
audience and we need to include elements of
comedy that both our primary and secondary
audience can understand. This will contribute to
the success of our opening sequence.

9. Our next question was, “What don’t you enjoy
about films?” We asked our participants this so that
we could gather information on which codes and
conventions caused our target audience to dislike
certain films. Some of the answers we received
stated that they don’t enjoy it “when they have long
non-descript storylines…gratuitous sex and
violence” and they don’t like it “if the plot like drags
out” or “when they’re too slow”.

10. This taught us that we need to make sure that our
opening sequence introduces the audience to the
narrative of the film straight away in order to
captivate the audiences attention and keep them
engaged throughout the film. We also need to
make sure that both our primary and secondary
audience are able to relate to the film’s narrative
and are both able to enjoy the film without losing
interest.

11. Next we gave our participants a list of films, that
we had already looked at as part of our ‘Coming
of Age’ film research, and asked them to tell us
which films they had seen. We learnt from this
that the most popular film on the list was ‘Mean
Girls’ followed by ‘Juno’ and the least popular
films were ‘The Graduate’ and ‘The 400 Blows’.
Asking our participants this question taught us
which films had a wider fan base and which were
more relevant and well-known to our target
audience. This means that we have evidence of
which codes and conventions our audience are
aware of and which methods have proved to be
successful, thus allowing us to follow in their
footsteps.

12. Finally, we asked our participants which of the films, on
our list, they liked and why. We learnt that they enjoyed
these films because they were good at “explaining
teenage feelings” and because they “found them very
relatable. This furthers the notion that we need to make
sure that both our primary and secondary audience
need to be able to relate to narrative due to the codes
and conventions of this particular genre. Additionally,
we were given a larger impression on how comedy
contributes to the success of a ‘Coming of Age’ film.