Audience Research

For my audience research, I decided to do a poll on my blog. To get voters, I advertised my blog on my facebook page which gave me a huge advantage, however, I was still unable to get more than 20 or so voters. Despite being a low number of people, I will still use the results from the poll and apply it to my final short film.
Below are the graphs displaying the results of my questions:

This graph clearly shows that more females voted compared to males, there were 17 voters in total. Unfortunately this means that my results won't be gender-balanced but I still do have some male voters which will hopefully be able to represent the male gender. I decided to use age groups as well as the gender to see how many people of certain age voted as this will contribute to the decision of my target audience. Judging by these results, I think my target audience will be aimed at Females aged between 14-20 and have a secondary audience of Males aged 14-20 as they are the majority of the voters, therefore this would make my product more appealing to them from the results of this poll.

This graph shows the voters favourite film genres. I believe that Horror has received the least votes due to the number of female voters as females are often stereotyped as sensitive and often scared-easily so Horror isn't a popular genre for them. Most of the voters voted for Romance or Rom-Com which is the genre type that I have chosen, so I'm pleased to see that it is well-favoured as this will make it appealing for the target audience.

I asked this question on what gender the voters associated with the genre Romance to see who my primary target audience should be aimed at. In my original idea, I was going to aim it at young males but after seeing these results, I will make teenage boys my secondary audience and teenage females my primary target audience. I think that the female gender is more associated with romance than boys is because many females read and fantasise about finding "Mr Perfect" or "Mr Right" and like to escape into the Romantic genre to find out about romance and what to (or not!) expect.

After my previous research on short films, I found that short films can last any length from 1 minute to 20 minutes and possibly longer! So I decided to ask the voters about how long they would prefer a short film to last and their answer was 5-7 minutes with a majority of 10 people voting. This therefore is the length of short film I'm going to aim for, however, I think if I go slightly over the 7 minutes, it should be ok.

Other Research:
I also did some other research with my group of friends. There were 12 of them in total with a mixture of genders, and we talked generally about short films and their expectations. I made a note of some of the key things I will take into consideration:
- The storyline has to be clear. I showed some examples of short films and most of them found that the more complicated or unclear narratives were less enjoyable. However, they didn't mind having an ambiguous ending or having an unexpected twist (either at the end or mid-narrative).
- The number of characters had to be small as, due to the short length of time, understanding who they all are and what relevance they have to the storyline is quite demanding and often complicates the viewer. Therefore, they recommended that I only had a small cast, unless more people as extras were necessary.
- They liked some of the comedy films, such as the video "A Hopeless Romantic" that I analysed. The boys especially laughed when the male lead got run over by a car as they didn't expect it. I am going to try and include some comical moments in my short film but the main focus is going to be on the drama.