Pilot Survey Results

Here is the link to the the Pilot Survey - https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/F9MZGJB

I created this survey around about a week ago and it now have 33 responses which I felt was good number to be able to generalise, collect and compare results at.

The first two questions I asked were " What is your age" and " What is your gender" , I asked these questions because when it came to comparing the results it would be good to see if there were any difference to what females answered compared to males but also if different age groups prefer different things. Even though our target audience it ranged around 15 to 20 I sent the survey to a range of ages to help with the comparing. The responses show that the majority of the responses are from 15 to 20 year olds which didn't surprise me as even though I sent it out through social media expecting more from the different age groups the majority of people on social media are aged 15 to 20 which is why I thought it was a good why to reach our target audience. Something I was surprised about though was that the majority the responses were from females however, horror films used to be seen as more of a male oriented film but recently there has been more female influence within the film industry with female protagonists instead of damsels in distress which is what could have impacted the responses.

I wasn't very surprised by the responses I got for question three "Do you watch horror films often", as it's not a genre that's aimed/ caters for everyone's interests, I feel that the results turned out this way because the majority of people don't like to be scared and wouldn't voluntarily watch a film to get scared. Going with the stereotype that horror films are more for men, in the individual responses for my survey I saw that only three females selected 'yes' to 'Do you watch Horror Films Often' and the other 18 answered either no, sometimes or depends on the sub-genre. However, the males had the same results with just 2 saying yes, so that 'Horror films are for men' doesn't apply to my results. This is something I'm going to take on board in the planning stages to make sure that the short horror film is aimed at both males and females and not just one gender.



For the fourth question I asked 'Out of these Horror sub-genres which would you say you prefer' because there's a range of sub-genres with many different aspects that we could include in our production. I gave 11 choices with an option for them to add anything if they wished. I wasn't very surprised by the results as the sub-genres comedy and paranormal both tied for the most popular choice, even though they are two completely different sub-genres they both has similar aspects, these two sub-genre cover a wide range of the horror genres audience as people who aren't that interested by horror film will usually watched comedy horror as you still have that conventional aspect of fear, jump-scares etc. however, the comedy appeals to more people and calms down the tension of the film without removing it completely. People who watched horror films more often picked the paranormal sub-genre as it's a more traditional sub-genre along with psychological which was the next most voted.



The age of the characters in a horror movie can vary as there isn't really any conventional age, it can be decided upon different aspects in the horror genre such as, storyline, location/setting, time period, the theme etc. In this case I wanted to ask out audience how old they would prefer the characters to be and their was a tied results of 'Similar to my own age' and 'Adults' being the most popular. I wasn't very surprised by this as the average age for our target audience is 17 who are on the edge of being adults. I found that the majority of people who had selected 'similar to my own age' were 15 to 20 year olds and those who'd selected 'adults' are a percentage of 15 to 20 year olds but also 21 to 30 / 31 to 40 year olds  which still goes along with my theory of people want to have characters in a film the same age as them because they feel they can connect and relate to them more but also the situations they get put in, because of their age would be relatively similar to ones the audience might have been in making the film more personal however, something like that isn't always as easy to do in a horror film but for the character to be scared and frightened could have to same effect on the audience.

When looking at the average response rating for questions 5, 6, 7 and 8 I wasn't surprised by most of the results however, I was surprised that setting/location had the lowest importantance ranking at 66. Since doing research into conventional locations/settings for horror films I found that there a multiple that with the right aspects adding could be as scary as any other location which is why I believe people don't thing it's as important as the others but that it's really other mise-en-scene in the scene such as lighting, props etc. Both the soundtrack and storyline/backstory were ranked in the 80's for importance which is something I wasn't surprised about becuase I personally feel that a good storyline is the most important to help the audience become engrossed in what is happening and the responses show that our target audience feel it is important too even if it isn't for the same reason, soundtrack is the one that got the highest ranking out of the four questions and I believe this is because the biggest part of horror films is the suspense building to those conventional jump-scares which is what the horror genre is all about, the fear and emotions they create in their audience through things like this and the soundtrack is an important aspect to fulfilling this. Lastly, character development has an average ranking of 69 and with us doing a short film we know that character developemt is something we won't be able to do in a long over the time thing however, it is still something we want to include even if it is just a small development and seeing the responses shows that the audience feel it's something that's important but slightly in the middle of majorly important.

During my horror genre and form research I did a section on themes and while doing it I saw that there were a lot that could be applied to the storyline we're thinking of going with so before fully deciding I wanted to see which ones were most popular with out target audience. Overall I was slightly surprised that 'supernatural' was the most voted I has predicted the theme of religion would be the most popular but then looking through IMDb at the recently realised horror films a lot of them do have a supernatural theme to them as well as 'good vs evil' which is what I think has impacted the responses. Also, more iconic films such as Paranormal Activity had a supernatural theme meaning it fits into the paranormal sub-genre which was one of the most voted horror sub-genres, when I looked at the individual responses I found that the majority of people who voted paranormal also voted supernatural.

Doing this pilot survey has showed us what our target audience like/prefer within the horror genre and has given us ideas on aspects such as, the Good Vs Evil and supernatural themes within our short film and seeming as the majority of the votes for those themes came from both our target audience and slightly older we feel it could help out short film interest slightly older age groups even if it is not targeted at them as we don't want to completly restrict all of our decisions on the target audience.