AS Media
Progress tracker of AS Media project by Matthew Facer
Candidate Number: 7547
Audience Research (Our Film Rating):
In order to think about what our film's rating would be, we had a look at BBFC film classifications. From what we found we gathered that our film - a crime thriller/action thriller - would likely have to be around a 15 or 18 due to the amount of violence and potentially explicit language that could feature. It was hard to initially judge because obviously our opening won't be able to have a plethora of different features like sexual activity or drug use but we certainly want to have a weapon shown on screen which then indicates a moderate (or even higher!) level of threat and violence.
When thinking about our own film, we want to have a gangster-like activity like arms dealing and perhaps some form of drug dealing which instantly puts the age rating at a minimum of 15. That plus the idea that we would probably end up having some form of swearing in there at some point (certainly no very strong uses) ensured our film would remain at 15. The idea that we would have some type of violence in the film at the later stages also made us confident the film would be a 15. We knew our film would avoid being an 18 certificate because there wouldn't be any excessively strong swearing or discriminatory language nor would the violence be too graphic/gory or the drug use too profane.
Audience Research (Questionnaire):
We decided as a group that it would probably be a good idea for us to gather some information from a target audience in order to make sure our film concept (as well as the opening) would be appealing. In order to achieve this, we believed it to be a good idea to create a questionnaire to be filled out by a small sample size chosen by us. Originally, we had aimed to give our questionnaire to around 40 people but I had the idea of shortening to just 24 to represent the niche audience our film would be aimed at.
Of our sample of 24, we chose to target marginally more men than women as we feel as though our film would be more appealing to the male audience. Of course, this is simply a stereotype as generally men are more into that genre of film but we still asked girls just to gauge whether or not they'd like that genre of film. We also targeted a younger audience in general but with a few older people involved too just to make sure we didn't only target one age group.
From this portion of the questionnaire, we could see that a lot of people actually wanted to see a comedy but we decided that it would be incredibly difficult to master the genre especially considering it'll be the first time we've ever made a film. Our dark brand of humour probably doesn't match up with most of the audience's either! We decided from this that we should probably make a thriller considering it was the 2nd most popular and had the easiest conventions to follow.
Our next question was related to the fact that we were assuming (or rather hoping!) that most people would select their favourite genre as thriller in the previous question. Luckily a large enough proportion didn't dislike the thriller genre so were happy to answer further anyway. It was clear to us that we needed a solid plot with a cool looking character. There also needed to be some psychological aspect that we decided would have to be incorporated into the later film.
The final question is perhaps the most important for our character dynamics and we gave the option of answering with multiple boxes; due to this we came to the conclusion that most people wanted to see some kind of psychopathic male protagonist which we decided would come in the form of the arms dealer main character. A bad guy would be a good idea for us too but we decided that the bad character would have to come into the film later on.