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.