Audience Research

Before deciding on our story for our own Film Noir movie, we needed to do some audience research to see what people would be interested seeing in our films and how much they already know about Film Noir. Therefore I made a questionnare on Microsoft Word and printed out copies to ten people of different ages, an under 15 year old,  3 people 15-17, 4 people 18-20 and two over 21. I decided to do this to see the difference of knowledge between the different ages, and chose mainly people 15-20 as this would be our preferred age range, channeling to people our age. I also chose a 50/50 mix of male and female as we would like our film to appeal to both genders equally and so needed to find out preferences from both.

Below is a print screen image of the finished questionnaire:

Looking at the results, first of all, only the under 15 year old hadn't seen any of the Film Noir titles, but had still heard of the genre. Everyone else had heard of the genre and seen at least one Film Noir or Neo Noir film. From the question 'Do you prefer the classic Film Noir style in black and white or the new Neo-Noir style in colour?' 5 people answered 'Black and White' whereas 2 answered 'colour' and 3 answered 'I like both equally'. Therefore we shall show our film in black and white as it is the most popular and also more classic and fitting to the Film Noir style.

With the question 'What aspects of Film Noir do you like (tick) and dislike (cross)?' all of the answers on average were ticked, except cigarette smoking. Smoking was very popular around the time when Film Noir started, and was shown in a lot of the films. In the modern day however, it is more dissapproved of because the health risks have become a lot more known, so we shall not include smoking in our film, giving it a modern twist and so not encouraging younger viewers. We shall make sure to include a Femme Fatale, cyinical male character, a dark/depressing storyline, crime and murky pasts, and also from the feedback on 'What sort of things do you expect to see when you watch a Film Noir film?' we will also include a twist in the storyline, an urban setting and night time scenes.