Focus Group Footage

This is the edited footage of our Focus Group. As mentioned already, it only includes the points that we found useful, when raised, in improving our original opening sequence idea.

Summary Post

I have doen as much as possible in these two hours.

Ove the holidays, I plan to do two things. Firstly, I want to start finding some examples of soundtracks and secondly I want to start thinking about how I will be storyboarding the opening sequence when I get back.

Soundtracks

Upon gaining a better understanding of the soundtracks that are used within Thrillers, in particular Action Thrillers, as the newest treatment tends to fall into this category, I have decided to try and find some soundtracks that will be good enough to set the two moods needed.

The first soundtrack needs to create either a calm, and tranquil atmosphere or give an easy, ongoing atmosphere, which will probably be best created with soundtracks that include repetition of various parts.

The second soundtrack will need to create the complete opposite mood, that being a frantic, hi-tempo one. This will be included within the 'fight' scenes that are picked up y the CCTV camera. I will continue to search for suitable soundtracks in the next few weeks.

Focus Group Video

By the end of this lesson, I plan to have the video footage that we got from our Focus Group up on this blog. I have edited the footage so it only includes the information that we are or have considered to change within the treatment re-write, which is already up. I would have liked to put this video up much sooner but I have been focussing on sorting out the research/questionnaire findings first.

Description of Screenplay

Within the screenplay, there is no dialogue. This is due to two things. Firstly, it will keep the tension that our opening sequence will need to rely on, as its one of the key conventions in the Thriller genre. Secondly, we don't really want to give too much away about our main character, again adding to the tension but also we want our audience to remain watching as they will want to find out more about this character through the weird goings on that the audience witness with the man in the car park.

You will also notice that there is two soundtracks. This has been decided on for a particular effect. We want to juxtapose the calm, everyday nature of the man's life with the dramatic and frantic events that we come to find out is all in his mind. So we will select a soundtrack that implements these two moods and include them both within our opening sequence to create the mood intended.

Screenplay

(No Dialogue throughout)

(Establishing shot showing the street)

(Man walking down the street in a suit with a briefcase in hand)

(Soundtrack 1 playing over the top)

(Starts with a slow, calm mood)

(Shot type: Close up, beginning from feet, up)

(Camera reaches knees)

(Edit shot to flip to a car park)

(Soundtrack 2 playing over the top)

(Frantic mood/atmosphere created)

(Man is shown swinging arms as if punching something)

(Camera edited to look like a CCTV camera)

(Shot switches back to calm atmosphere)

(Back to Soundtrack 1)

(Camera continues to pan up the man's body)

(Camera reaches waist)

(Shot goes back to car park)

(Soundtrack 2 starts again)

(Man is seen with another figure, face is not seen)

(Still flailing his arms)

(Switches between calm and frantic atmospheres)

(Soundtrack 2 still plays)

(Camera still pans up the mans body)

(CCTV CAMERA follows the 'fight')

(Camera reaches just below man's head)

(Blacks out, along with soundtrack, not revealing man's identity)

 

Survey Findings

Overall, we found that our typical audience member would be of an age range of 21-40, as a majority 60.5% answered our survey being of that age range. 

We also found that generally people answering our questionnaires were females with 63.2% and males with 36.8%. 

Our audience member appears to be teachers, or just generally employed people, who are able to afford cinema tickets and DVDs. Although thriller didn’t come out as overall favourite, it did come out in top three, comedy coming first with 42.1%, romance with 21.6% and thriller with 26.3%. 

People liked thrillers because they liked the suspense and tension given by it, and they like the sense of mystery, as they like to keep guessing the outcome and they consider it generally entertaining.

A majority of our answers came from people that watch films fairly often, with the vast majority of people accessing media through DVD's and TV. 

A majority of our participants said that they most commonly saw adverts on the TV, billboards and from the Internet due to easy accessibility.

These results were fairly useful. We now know a definite age range group that our opening sequence will appeal to. The responses we received also fit alongside our focus group, so with both the focus group and our surveys giving similar answers, we will now be able to work on our screenplay and base it around their responses, for example, we could add a romance story alongside the thriller storyline, as romance is the second most watched genre of our survey group, however, we could not do the same with comedy, as it would relieve the audience of the tension that must be kept for our thriller movie. To gain a better understanding of our audience and their relationship with the thriller genre, we may need to create another questionnaire with more genre specific questions that link to Thrillers.

Thursday 15th December 2011

Today, I am planning to post the video footage that we received from our focus group, which has been cut down to just include the main points that we are now considering to use within the new treatment that we have began work on. This will then be followed up by another video that we plan to start at a later date, that involves our group talking about the feedback that we got from the focus group and whether we found it useful or not as well as talking about how we plan to try and implement these in our new treatment.

Because I am the only one in my group that is in to work today, I realise that I will not be able to complete all of the work that I plan to do today so I will continue to carry on with my work tomorrow.

The main tasks that I need to do:
- Screenplay
- Upload the Focus Group footage
- Soundtracks ( Info/examples on)
- Plan the group feedback video
- Begin to write up a storyboard of the treatment

Tuesday 13th December

Today, I have posted up the new treatment idea that I came up with over the weekend. I have also began to start looking at various styles of music soundtracks that we can include within the 2 parts of the opening.

During the week, Im going to try and post various examples of soundtracks onto my blog and then choose the final ones which we will include in this treatment.

Sound

Our new treatment idea, being of the thriller genre, will have to include one or two soundtracks to create contrasting atmospheres within the strobing effect that we plan to use.

We know that we need to spend a considerable amount of time when choosing the soundtracks and we will continue to research these either at home or in any other lessons that we are able to do it.

Treatment Re-Write

Over the weekend, I wrote up a new treatment idea. Within my treatment, I tried to keep some of the main elements of our original plot idea, however I have changed various parts.

New Treatment

 I based my new opening around both the original opening idea that our group had and the main inspiration to this new treatment, Fight Club. This is because Fight Club has a very strong psychological element to it, which is one of the key features that we plan to include within our opening sequence. It begins with a brief establishing shot of the area, which slowly begins to focus on the main character. We then, starting from his feet, see the camera slowly pan up his body in the 'calm atmosphere' side of the opening. We will then switch the shot to various 'fight' scenes that the main character 'psychologically' goes through every night. There are various shot types and editing techniques that I plan to include within these fight scenes. Firstly, a few of the shots will be filmed as if the audience is actually there witnessing it, and we will try and film parts above the action, trying to make the shot seem like its being filmed on a CCTV camera, which will be achieved in iMovie once we start editing.

This idea will be filmed in a number of ways to create various moods that are specifically associated with our genre: 

- Locations suitable to the plot ( Car Park for fight scenes, normal street setting for calm mood)

- Main character showing his psychological frustration

- Fights with the main character on his own (shows no-one being with him)

- Also showing shots with someone else with him

- Use various shot types within the action (extreme close-ups)

To show the CCTV effect, we are using this editing effect on iMovie:

Target Audience Graphs and Conclusive Findings

Over the weekend, our group plans to take up individual roles in finalising the Research phase. As well as writing up our own screenplays for the opening sequence, we will be getting the results graphs from our questionnaires and coming to an overall conclusion on the target audience and other findings.
We will be answering theses questions:



1) What conclusions can you make about your findings? What do they tell you?
2) Who is your target audience?
3) How are you going to make your opening sequence appeal your audience?
4) Is there anything else you need to know about your target audience?


To evidence our findings, we will be publishing screen grabs of the graphs/tables that show our results onto our blogs.

Focus Group Findings

On Tuesday, we held our focus group, showing them both our treatment pitch and inspirations, in order to help us reflect on any additional comments and opinions that they have on our opening sequence that we created originally. As all of those involved in our focus group were of our chosen target audience age, they would ultimately be the best people to ask these questions of. We also showed them the opening of American Beauty. This was an example of a film opening, specifically from our chosen thriller genre. We then asked the focus group a number of questions regarding our opening sequence, the initial plot idea and their overall opinion of the thriller genre in general. As a group we feel that we gained a lot from our focus group and we will be able to create an opening sequence that our target audience will enjoy and want to watch more of, using the suggested ideas from the focus group and the new ideas that over tim we have come up with.

Based on our focus group, we decided on a few things: 


1. Our target audience would be Males and Females from 25 to 50 years of age.

2. To capture our target audience in the opening sequence, we will use action to keep them interested, as we found that it will add a bit of mystery to the opening sequence as to why this action sequence is happening. We will also add some slow paced scenes within the opening to create a juxtaposition, it adds more tension and suspense. We will also have some dramatic and slow paced music to build tension and to keep the audience hooked and interested in the film.

3. We found that the focus group would like to see a mix of slow and fast paced shots within the opening sequence to keep them interested. This would be achieved with a strobing effect that switches between these two moods that we are planning to use. A slow paced opening sequence may bore them and not keep them interested and a fast paced opening may not suit the idea of our film, and will be hard to do right. 


As a result, our group decided that our opening sequence needed some changing, and so we will all individually write a screenplay based on the comments from the Focus Group and when we next come back together, we will share these ideas and begin to determine either which screenplay is better or take ideas from each one and merge them together.

Thursday 8th December 2011 - Focus Group Footage

Today, whilst the rest of my group dealt with the results and findings that we have received from our questionnaires and find out who our target audience actually is, I took time to go through the footage of the Focus group discussions and take out the main thoughts and ideas that we received from them and put them into a video which will then be posted onto our blogs at a later date.

We also plan to give our own group discussion within this video, talking about each individual point that we received an explain how we plan to implement this into our opening sequence or whether we feel there would be a better way of doing the raised point.

Audience Research (part 2)

As part of our work today, we have to, as a group, discuss the potential target audience of our opening sequence. This will be an important part of determining how we can collectively gather our research together in order to find a specific age group for our opening sequence to be aimed at and to accurately see whether our originally planned target audience goes along with this result. In this phase, we will be holding a Focus Group, in which we have decided to try and persuade teachers within our school to take part in, as well as the results that we receive from our questionnaire results.

We have decided to get teachers involved in our focus group as there are a variety of different age groups, varying both within our predicted target audience category as well as above and below. This will give us a much wider age range to accurately determine the actual target audience that we will need to aim our opening sequence at. We have written a letter that we will be sending to a number of the teachers around our school. We are aiming to have 5-6 teachers within this focus group but we will most likely send the letter to more just as a precautionary measure. We will also have to come up with a few questions that we will ask them in order to gather research into their particular views into both our chosen genre and opening sequence. We have discussed these in our group and have come up with the following:

What do you think our target audience is, based on the treatment idea?
How could we make the treatment more appealing to our target audience?
Would the original concept of our treatment make you want to watch the rest of the film? Why?
What is your initial thoughts on the treatment/idea?
Which aspects of our chosen thriller genre would you expect to see in our opening?