Secondary Research

Audience Profile and Focus Group

Audience profile
My profile includes demographic and psychographic characteristics of my chosen group.
My target audience for my focus group is 15-22, male and female. Through my questionnaire I discovered that both men and women enjoyed watching horror films. People in this age group are known to watch the most horror films as they are at the age that they enjoy the thrill and they also have enough time to go to the cinema when a new film comes out. I would like my audience to be able to relate to the characters in my script which persuades them to see the movie. My audience are all in college and as a group of friends they are most likely go and see horror films with each other. Psychgraphically, I made sure I picked a group of people who enjoyed the genre horror and like watching horror films both at home and in the cinema. The selection will be from a working class status as they are all students earning minimum wage but can still afford to go to the cinema and buy films thanks to a student discount.
Mean audeince age: 18
Most 18 year olds discover a release of a new horror film over social media. This is because the internet is such a large part of today's society.
                           

Focus Group
For my focus group I will be using a group of four people aged 16 - 17, two male and two female, who all like horror films.
Keane is 16 years old and enjoys watching gory horror films the most. His favorite horror film is Saw. In his spare time he plays rugby and socialises with friends.
Gemma is 16 years old and loves all types of horror films. In her spare time she watches Netflix and spends time with her sister. They both enjoy watching horror films together.
Eve is also 16 years old and enjoys watching a mixture of horror films but her favorite is zombie horror. She enjoys watching films in her spare time and her favorite is Shaun of the Dead.
Adam is 17 years old and is open to watching any type of  horror films. In his spare time he plays sports and aspires to be a lawyer.
From the five questions that I asked them, here are my results.

Institutions

Distribution of media is the marketing and circulation of films. It focuses on the launching of films and how they stay known. In order to consider a films release date the distributor will have to consider the genre of the film. For example a horror films best release date is around Halloween whereas a romantic film would usually come out in summer to create the fantasy of a summer romance.
Vertical integration is the expansion of a company into different areas but on the same product path. Horizontal integration is the merging of companies.
A films theatrical release lasts 14 weeks and a film can only appear on TV two years after it's theatrical release.
P and A stands for prints and advertising. The key areas for distributors marketing a film are product, promotion, price and placement. The print posters will help to promote the film further. The average cost of a print is $1500.

Through secondary research I found the top ten horror films over the last five years and which institution distributed them.

10 - Let me in - Paramount Pictures
9 - Woman in black - Hammer Film Productions
8 - Troll hunter - Filmkameratene
7 - Cabin in the woods - Lionsgate
6 - Oculus - Blumhouse Productions
5 - It follows - Dimension Films
4 - A girl walks home alone at night - VICE Films
3 - The conjuring - Warner Bros. Pictures
2 - The babadook - Causeway Films
1 - Sinister - Momentum Pictures

All of these films have one thing in common, they have very high end and well known production companies. This is a contributing factor to why they are so well known. For my horror film I am going to use British Lion Films which is a small British company that has been active since 1919. The company have so far produced 170 films.

Results from questionnaire

Although the majority of people who answered questionnaires were adolescents, it gave me an idea of what that specific age group would want to see in a horror poster. This determined my marketability for my future production. I made sure to ask if the candidate liked horror films and if they did I could take their answer into consideration even more. Most of them said yes. I also asked what scared people as I could use it to my advantage and come up with an original idea for my horror poster and its design. I also asked for favourite horror films to compare the different posters that are available for my pre production research. I can see what colours and lighting to use when editing my images. I discovered that the favourite sub-genre was slasher so that is the main possibility for my horror poster. I may also do a Halloween themed, zombie horror film as most of my audience agreed that they thought they were effective when they come out at that time of the year. For my research I asked which film they would choose. The film knock knock, the image of the woman, was more appealing to the section of my audience who did not watch or particularly enjoy horror films. The reasoning for their choice was that the poster didn't look as scary as the other film. The film Shutter was chosen by the majority of my induce for reasons such as 'it looked scarier' and 'it looked like it had a good storyline such as a plot twist'. This is the type of horror poster I would like to recreate during my coursework.

Questionnaire

   

Evaluation of Guinness Poster

Time Plan

 

 

The Last Exorcism - Film Distribution Campaign

Conventions of Film Posters

Horror Poster Analysis