Evaluation of focus group questionnaire

Questionnaire evaluation

As part of our audience feedback, during our focus group we handed out several questionnaires to our participants so that they could give us important information about certain points.
Our first two questions were simple enough, we wished to find out if the audience could identify the age group and gender that we were aiming our trailer. Our feedback came back positive as five of the questionnaires came back with male and two came back with male & female, this was perfect as we discussed within the group that there would be elements of the plot that would attract a niche female audience, coming to the agreement that it would be roughly 20% female interest to the trailer and 80% male. The feedback on question two was also very positive as we aimed our trailer at the age group of 15-25 because of the survivor’s age and also the action and violence elements to the plot. We gave the audience the options of 12-18, 15-25, 18-40 and 20-50 and to our delight all participants chose 15-25, confirming our selection of age group as being relative.

For question three we asked the audience what genre they believe the film would be, and this was a very important question as it isn’t straight up what genre our plot came under because of it containing different elements from other genres, the group came to a constructed conclusion that it was a mixture of action/adventure/horror and judging from our feedback the majority of the audience agreed. We told them that they were able to chose more than one genre if they deemed it necessary and so we had seven votes for horror, one for action adventure, one for psychological thriller and two for thriller.
I was happy that the genre with the highest votes was horror and that we got at least one vote for action/adventure but what came as a slight shock was how we got three votes in the thriller genres, this confused me as we had not intended to include any aspects of thriller in our trailer and especially not in the plot, but I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the audience were confused about the definition of thriller and the differences between thriller and horror, and that may be why we had those votes.

So that we could see what shots worked well in the trailer, we asked the audience what shots stood out the most and if they could give us three if possible, this was our forth question. Our most mentioned shot was the radio scene, where the group of survivors are in the woods and they tune into a radio transmission for an emergency broadcast, I was happy that this scene got so much positive feedback as it’s a turning point in the plot that lets the viewer know that these survivors really no longer have any hope, they have to look out for themselves from now on. It was also our most heavily edited shot; we put a lot of effort into mixing the speech with the radio tuning sound and timing it right with what was going on in the footage as well.
Another highly mentioned shot was the beginning sequence of the human changing into the zombie, and this is good as that shot is meant to set the narrative of how some people have changed into the zombies and how aggressive and dangerous they are. One person mentioned the scene where one of the zombies gets shot by an arrow and is impaled against a tree, they commented that the fact the zombie hadn’t died increases the tension within the plot, which I was happy to see someone mention as that was our intention, showing that typical zombie killing fact that you have to aim for the head to kill them.

Question five gave us very positive feedback as we asked whether there was any shots or scenarios in the trailer that had made no sense to the viewers and for them to comment on which shot it was that gave this effect and fortunately all results came back saying all shots made sense, which I was very happy about as it shows that we conveyed the plot well and there were no shots that we had to remove or add to make the narrative make more sense.

For our sixth question we asked the audience if they would go and see the film in the cinema if it was to be released, and all the participants said yes, and most even went on to tell us why they would want to go see it. Most said they were interested to see who survived the apocalypse out of the survivors, which is good as in the plot of the group do actually get killed and it showed that there was some attachment to the characters if they cared who lived or died.

For number seven we asked if the trailer left you with any unanswered questions, this was important as we didn’t want anyone to say no, otherwise it would show that we either showed them the whole plot or this was just no interest in the plot at all, that they didn’t want to hear anything else about it.  In the feedback three people wanted to know what caused the infection, which I was glad to see as I wrote a whole back story to the plot about how the infection came to be. Then the two other questions unanswered was ‘what happens next?’ and ‘Do they survive?’, which where the cliff hangers we tried aiming for.

Finally for our last question, we wanted to know if all the intertitles made sense and related to the plot, as during editing we found it difficult to give the right amount of information within such a small sentence that the viewer had enough time to read it and also understand its meaning. We were happy to see that our work didn’t go unnoticed and all questionnaires came back saying that the intertiles hadn’t confused them in anyway and all made sense.

From this feedback we were able to reflect on our trailer in positive light, knowing what needed to be changed and what should be kept in the trailer as well.