Inspirations For Our Thriller Opening

A main thriller aspect we have planned to use in our thriller openings is ambiguity. We want to portray the idea of ambiguity through five character's body parts. During our product research we made the extension to look at films other than thrillers to find wider ideas and further inspiration therefore, researched the comedy "Breakfast Club". The results of our audience research from our target audience "16-20" year olds showed that 8/9 enjoy the genre of comedies therefore to respond to our audiences preferred style we chose to take elements of this comedy, the cast of five teenagers who are at first strangers to each other. Young adults are also the main audience for franchisers such as "The Hunger Games" in which there is a battle of the fittest between the characters; a theme that we also feature in our film.

 

Another thriller element that we want to portray in our thriller opening is a clinical effect. This idea reminded us of the horror "Human Centipede". We researched this horror and saw that it related to our ideas. The idea of a character acting in a doctor type role and the idea of a group of people getting harmed were similar. We have chosen to include a group of teenagers as our main characters - as in "Breakfast Club" - who will ultimately have to fight for survival

Vox Pop

From our vox pop we gained the information of what our target audience expect to be in a thriller and some thrillers that they know. This has helped to get an idea of what we could include in our thriller opening.

Audience Research

Twenty questionnaires were printed and handed out to help inform use of public opinion. After tallying up the results of our audience research we decided to go on excel and convey them in bar and pie charts.
We realised that our questionnaire weren't fully representative as most of the respondants were female and there was not a balance between both genders, therefore we chose a balanced cast of 3 males and 3 females.

According to this bar graph, the seemly age range for our thriller is 16-20 years old. This indicates that we could apply some generic conventions of a teenager in the film. However in our questionnaires we also asked how they are presented in the public and most replies believed that they were stereotyped critically because of there age.

Our audience enjoy both mainstream and independent companies but from the pie chart we can tell that mainstream was the most popular. This would mean that our group should aim to include mainstream conventions to appeal to a greater amount of the audience. Nevertheless we should not forget that there still is a large amount of people who prefer independent and to appeal to them we need to try and balance out the right amount of mainstream and independent conventions.

A great amount of the audience chose comedy as their favourite genre. At first we did not know how to interpret these findings. As we conducted more product research and studied what films are also aimed at our target audience we came across ‘The Breakfast Club’ – a cult comedy.  We decided to include the idea of a group of teenagers.



The results show that a significant amount of our audience have got Facebook accounts. This indicates that this social networking site is the greatest way to let people know about our thriller. Although there still is a great deal of people who are on Twitter, the majority of the participants had both Facebook and Twitter.