PRE-PRODUCTION SURVEY

In order to get more ideas for our film opening which would appeal to a specific target audience we constructed a small online survey in which people would answer a series of horror genre questions related to our film opening.
These are our results.

Our first simple question asked the age group each participant fell into. Although this seems like an unnecessary question, it helped us decide what our target audience would be for our film opening.

Clearly, our target audience consists of 16-20 year olds, so we must make sure that the opening is suitable for this age group.

 This question also helped us look at how frequently horror films are watched by our target audience so that we were then able to ensure that this specific target audience would be relevant when creating our opening. A fair amount of our answers claimed to have watched several horror films in the recent time span, so the target audience is a good group of people to base the aspects of our opening around.

This question helped us decide whether we should stick with the codes and conventions of slasher horror and film using a traditional male antagonist or female. The vote was equal for both male and female so we decided primarily to have two killers(one of each gender) but after looking through our footage we came to the conclusion that it wasn't clear that there were two killers so we decided to just have one Killer.

From this question we can gather that the killers history and back story are the most popular aspects of the slasher sub-genre. We tried to implement some jump scares in our opening where appropriate.

This question is quite important as a convention which we want to follow is the killer's mask. Because it is a film opening, including a mask with the killer allows the audience to be enticed into knowing who is under the mask. As seen here, the majority of people wanted either a simple white mask, or a gory mask. However, we feel that a plain white mask is too basic and possibly even cliche, therefore we will put some effort into designing and making our own gory mask. This will also be an important mise en scene and narrative element in the storyline.

Location is of course an important element of our film opening, and there are many various types of setting which we could potentially use. However, those who took the survey suggested an isolated town, closely followed by an isolated urban setting. When location scouting, we felt that having an urban setting would be more atmospheric, as well as being a setting in which both our first victim and antagonist would be able to fit into.