Within thus questionnaire, I wanted to look into what people want to see within a short film. I had a variety of different answers that I plan to look into further with more research.
In the first question, I ensured asking the audiences age so that I know what type of age range will be answering my questions. It can clearly be seen that the majority of people that answered were aged 15-30 with the 15-20 category being the most answering by 76.9%. This is the same age range that myself and my group fit into meaning that their ideas could be similar to mine which is a positive as it means that when it comes to creating our final piece. However, it’s unfortunate I was not able to receive many answering from people aged 31 to over 50, because their opinions would also be helpful to me as I do want to include people of all ages in my target audience, however I still see this being possible though by doing more research within the target audience topic.
In the second question, I asked the gender for each person answering so that I can know the main gender answering the questions which in this case it was females as they were the majority by 61.5 whereas males were 38.5%. This question does not necessarily hold great significance but it will just give me a rough idea of who’s answering.
This question is where I begin to ask the audience about short films in order to aid the short film I will be creating. I firstly asked how long they preferred short films to be, as this is important for me to know because I do not want to be producing too little content nor too much. The majority of people seemed to prefer short films being 6-10 minutes long as this answer held the majority by 69.2%. However, it is important to note that I made an error when creating the answers for this question as instead of putting 7-10 minutes, I put 6-10 which is not correct as the option previous to this one stars 4-6 minutes. However despite this error, I know not to make my short film any less than 6 minutes or any more than 10.
On to the next topic of short films I had to ensure that I asked my audience which genre they would prefer to see and as it can be seen, the results are quite divided. The genres of comedy, drama, science-fiction, horror, thriller and supernatural are all present in the results, however thriller and comedy won by both receiving 30.8% on each. This shows to be quite helpful as thriller is the genre our group wanted to go through with, even though comedy also received the same results, it is hard to achieve true comedy in film, therefore it is safer to use thriller as our main genre as this is a genre we know how to work with well.
This question was a difficult one to ask because personally I want our short film to appeal to people of all ages but I felt obligated to ask it anyway as it is still important to know what people think about the age range for people who watch short films. It does appear that a younger audience will be the ones viewing the film as the most popular ages are 15-30 at 61.5% and 21-30 at 30.8%, however 41-50 is still on there with 7.7%. Therefore, I now know that I have a younger target audience, which means that I will keep the film intriguing with enough action to keep them interested in the film.
In this question, the results were almost equal by female reaching 46.2% and males reaching 38.5%. Despite these results, I still want to make the film unisex so that people of whatever gender can enjoy because there won’t be anything in your film that will be aimed for a specific gender anyway.
In this question I wanted to know where the most appropriate place to upload my short film would be in addition to where people prefer watching them and as I expected the majority of the people who answered stated that they would rather watch short films on youtube (84.6%). This is helpful because, obviously, YouTube is easier to access and to upload videos on. Furthermore, through youtube, a wider audience can be reached, therefore this is the ideal platform.
I ensured that I asked the audience their preferred narrative so that when it comes to creating a storyline, it is easier to know how many characters should be, who the story is focussed on and why it’s focussed on them and overall what the story is. Once again, in this question, there were a few results for each option, however a single strand storyline seemed to be the most preferred as it reviewed 38.5% of the votes. Along with this, a non linear storyline was also one of the more popular ones (15.4%), which is helpful as this is a storyline I would like to experiment with.
Also, I had to know which type of endings people wanted to see as this is an important element to the narrative. The majority of people who answered selected a a prophetic ending which is similar to an open ending , but it tends to be more certain, for example the doom of fortune that was prominent in the storyline will also be prominent in the ending. The second most popular answer was a closed ending by 30.8%, which almost shows overall that most people would prefer a more certain ending.
In this question, I needed to know the type of visual style people wanted to see, such as experimental which is non conventional filmmaking by changing up scenes by using different camera angles such as worms eye view, birds eye or a dutch angle to put the audience off or to create confusion. The other was conventional, ,which is just the standard filmmaking we see used in cinema day to day, so normal camera angles such mid shots, wide shots and long shots, overall quite basic. However, the chosen visual style is experimental (76.9%), which is definitely more useful as it will fit well with the thriller genre.
I was interested to know if the audience would like to see multiple camera angles, and it’s clear to see that through the results of this question that, they do as 100% answered yes. This is good to know as myself and my group are planing to use multiple camera angles as we believe that this is a very important part to filmmaking as it definitely keeps the story flowing and more interesting.
Character development can be the most important part of films for some people as it keeps them intrigued to know the true mission behind a character, or their overall personal development to become a better person for themselves. 100% of the people who answered clearly would like to see some character development, and this will work particularly well if we use a single-strand storyline.
Similar to character development, 100% of the audience think that it is also important to build up a relationship with the character over the films timespan. This can be done through making the character relatable or putting them in a vulnerable position that the audience wants to see them get out of.
I asked the audience what keeps them interested in a short film and 46.2% of them answered saying an interesting/ intriguing storyline, 30.8% stated that it’s the visuals and the scenery and 23.1% of them said multiple camera angles. I will ensure that I include all of these as it is not hard to do, therefore the audience will stay captivated by the work.
After asking all of the basic questions about filmmaking, is started getting into my own ideas for our short film. Therefore in this question I asked the audience how they feel feel about supernatural themes. Overall I had positive responses such “interesting”, “cool” and “better than boring “real life” films”. However one persons stated that this is a “difficult genre to perfect” as it can seem very fake if not done properly. Therefore I need to remember that when writing our scripts, but because we are focussing on witches, I believe that they are easier to make realistic rather than any other supernatural element.
In these four questions, I started to get more into the Wiccan religion by asking the audience more about it. And it is clear that a lot of them aren’t familiar with it, for example, 58.3% are not familiar with the religion. However a majority of them (58.3%) do think that religious representation is important in film, and 72.7% of the audience would find it interesting to learn about a new religion in a short film. Therefore this shows quite a positive response to using elements of Wiccan religion and witchcraft in our work, as this is something that is not common with most people, which shows that leaning more about it through a short film or will be interesting as well as eye opening. 83.3% would be interested to see Wiccan witchcraft and other elements of the religion being practiced in the short film interesting, therefore this is definitely going to be a part of our film.
For the last question, I just asked the audience if they had a favourite short and I did luckily get some replies. This is just so that I could get an idea as to what they like and what elements of these films I should be including in my own.
Overall, I will use this information within my project usefully as it has given feedback as to what people want to see, therefore I will include what they want while also sticking to the genre I want my short film to fit in to.
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