The aim of audience research is know who the target audience is. If you do not carry out audience research, it is unlikely that your film will reach its intended demographic. Audience research also allows you to gather evidence of audience expectations of the film. It will basically tell you how you should market the film. Finally it ensures you adhere to the audience expectations.
A way of conducting audience research can be through questionnaires, or through surveys. A survey is when you get someone to answer a group of questions. Surveys can include open or closed questions. There are a few long questions however. This is because you want the people filling out the survey to complete it as quick as possible. This will allow you to get a lot of people to fill it out. Surveys also include optional questions.
Typical questions found in a film survey/questionnaire include ‘What is your preferred genre of film?', ‘Do you go to the cinema often?’, ‘do you enjoy watching movies at the cinema?’ etc.
This is the trailer for the movie Halloween, which was released in 1978. This is a very conventional trailer for horror movies. In terms of sound, the music being played is very dark. It is a piano and this creates suspense. A convention of a trailer is that the music used creates suspense, this is to make the audience want to go and watch the movie when it comes out, and this convention has been conformed to in this trailer.
The scenes that the trailer is set in is very conventional. One scene is set in a posh suburban area and another scene is set in a house. These settings are well known horror movie conventions. Directors like to set horror movies in suburban areas because its the last place you'd expect to contain a serial killer.
For Editing, many fades out and fade ins are used in the trailer. This is used to tell the audience the name of the Movie. Jump Cuts are also used. They're used when showing the audience all the times the Killer has murdered someone. This is effective because it creates the sense that the serial killer is ruthless and heartless.
A famous movie director in the horror slasher genre is John Carpenter. He is American and is best known for directing the critically acclaimed Halloween movie.
He was born on January 16 1948 in New York and he was educated at Western Kentucky University. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Films directed by Carpenter include:
Halloween (1978)
Escape from New York (1981)
Starman (1984)
They Live (1988)
In his movies, John Carpenter likes to use minimalist lighting, static cameras and distinctive scores (which tend to be self-composed).
The movie Halloween was a big success for Carpenter. He made the movie with a budget of $320 000 and yet it managed to gross over $65 million. It is one of the most successful independent films made.