Post Production Questionnaire - Research/ Evaluation

After finishing the filming and editing of the sequence, we had a small viewing, in which we gave out questionnaires in order to find out how people from our target audience felt about the film. It was my Job to get the film ready to play onto a DVD. This was done by going into Adobe Premiere, loading the file we had created, and then when it was open, exporting it to DVD.

After doing this, Chloe went about writing up the questionnaire and Johnny was responsible for publicising the showing, by putting up posters advertising when and where it would be.

Below is an example of one of the questionnaires we gave out (with responses)

After taking all of the questionnaires in, it was then my job to put together graphs and other information related to the questions.

Responses to each of the short answer questions can be seen below

From these responses, it is possible to see that our aim at creating a Murder mystery (or "Whodunit") was not as successful as we thought it would be. I feel that due to the use of both the classic mirror shock and the fast paced editing during the stabbing made the viewers believe it was a horror film. Although this may not have been our aim, it is still possible for the film to become a horror / murder mystery such as the famous "Scream", as the actual identity of the murderer is not revealed in this sequence, nor can we even see the person's face other than their eyes.

From these results, it is possible to see that there were quite a few people (40%) who would not continue to watch this film after seeing this opening. I feel the reasons for this large number is that not all of the people who came to watch the sequence were actually fans of the Thriller genre as they only came because their friends were also going, or for other similar reasons. Moreover, if they were fans of thrillers, the Horror / Murder Mystery as a combined genre is fairly niche as it only contains two of the sub-genres of the encompassing title of "Thriller" so they may not enjoy these types of films.

In order to reassure ourselves that the audience we had shown the piece to realise who the film was aimed at, we put this question in. This question allows the audience to think "Who is this film actually for?" which is something anybody asks themselves when thinking about going to see a film in the Cinema or even to rent for DVD (or Bluray). If they don't feel that it is aimed at them, the person is far less likely to want to watch the film.

These results show us that the majority of the audience felt that the murder was sufficiently scary (3 or above), which adds to the feel of the horror element to our murder mystery.

This last short answer question I felt was one of the more important questions on the questionnaire, as in a thriller music means almost everything. Only 5% of people felt that the music didn't fit well with the scene, and of the 95% that did feel it fit, 50% suggested that it played a key role when answering one of the longer questions.

Under the long-answer question of "What aspects did you enjoy most?" most people talked about either the music or the camerawork/editing leading up to and during the stabbing, or how they worked well in conjunction with each other. This further emphasises the importance of non-diegetic sound in thrillers.