Focus Group Review

As mentioned in my intial thoughts on our focus group I have analysed all the candidates thoughts and ideas of which I will sum up in this post.

Overall, I feel as though our focus group was very successful as it has given us a lot of ideas to implement into our trailer and has informed us of what our target audience would like to see in terms of narrative and sound especially. Although, it could have gone better if we had asked the quieter members of the focus group some direct questions to get them involved and give them positive feedback.

Feedback we recieved on what narrative our film should follow split the focus group up. Some thought as though a group narrative could lead to more opportunities and keep the film fresh learning new things about character over a period of time instead of quickly learning the manerisms of one character. However, at the same time it was understood that sometimes this can be confusing and hard to keep track of the characters and their significance the more you introduce. Also, the more characters you have the harder it is to be equally amotionally connected to each of them.

I have learned that trailers that are not in chronological order are a lot more engaging than those that are and are much more preffered as they don't give important plot points away as easily and when you go to watch the film you dont know what will happen after a scene you watched in the trailer. This was decided after we watched the trailer for Legend and because the benefits outweight the drwabacks we have decided that this is how we would like to structure our trailer.

Moreover, I found that the females in our target audience would like to see female characters with a lot more substance and instead of reacting to actions of the male characters they should act on their own thoughts and account. They don't want a female characters strongest contribution to the narrative to be their good looks, as seen in the Bronson trailer, and they would much prefer a similar female character to that in the Legend trailer.

I asked whether our target audience would like a narrative that presented a unique type of life style or one that is more relatable and the majority of candidates said they would like to watch a film that was more exiting than their daily life. Although, I agree with the members of the group who said this I feel as though we would not be able to do this idea justice due to the low budget we are restricted to. A film trailer like Green Street Hooligans would be much more manageable for us and suits our budget fine.

Lastly, we discovered that the genre of music did not neccesarily need to match the genre of film or the time period of which the film is set in. As long as the music fits with the narrative and tries to convey similar emotions then its fine to you music from any genre or time. The way sound is edited into the trailer is also important as it can help draw the attention of its audience at key points. For example, the Legend trailer includes lots of action shots and so the music needs to be energetic and throughout matches actions happening on screen especially when text comes up.

In conclusion, I think that the focus group went very well and that the ideas we recived ,as mentioned ,will be extremely useful when it comes to creating out trailer.

I feel as though we could gather a bit more quantititve data by creating a questionnaire and will definitely be considering producing one.