Saturday, 31 January 2009

Conducting a questionnaire

As a group we wanted some feedback about film noir to help us with our project. The feedback would be gained through primary research in the form of a questionnaire, as this way we could tailor the questions to ensure we would gain the useful answers we wanted. Emily devised the questionnaire and went out to ask people for answers. She asked 7 people in the 16-25 age range as they are the main cinema audience and they are who we would be aiming our noir towards. She also asked people aged 40, 28 and 14 to see if our film would appeal to a wider audience range as well. My job was to analyse the results and below is a table showing what I found out explaining how the information we gained from each question was useful to us.
We will attempt to incorporate our findings when creating our opening sequence to make it more appealing to our target audience of people aged between 15 and 25. The question about black and white films (question 2) will be particularly useful when we are in the editing suit and are choosing to add any effects to our film. Our results show that black and white films aren’t a popular choice and that they would turn off/over the TV if they saw one was on. Our role in creating our title sequence is to get people to stay tuned in and watch on to resolve the enigma(s), but if our audience would choose not to watch it just because it was in black and white, then perhaps we shouldn’t add that effect. Question number 5 also proved interesting with the results as it shows how people can be interested and ‘hooked’ in a film opening even if there isn’t any music to accompany it. We will still use music in our opening piece as we feel it’s the key to creating the right noir atmosphere, though it is useful to know that we won’t be turning away our audience if we chose to have loud sound effects, plain speech or dead silence instead. Although the resuls we gained were useful, there were still some things we could have done to gain even better results. Firstly we could have asked a bigger sample of people to gain more accurate results with defined replies on each question. However, I think the outcome would still contain similar results, and wouldn’t be of any further use to us. Also, we could have more questions requiring a more detailed answer (open questions) to gain more feedback from each person we gave the questionnaire to. But they may not have been as keen to fill it out if they had noticed how detailed it was. Overall, I am pleased with the results we discovered as they’ll be very useful to us in the future.

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