Research

Research

Aim:  To see which age group is most popular with watching short films and their favourite genre.

Back- Up Research- secondary research:

We researched short films on two main websites; You-tube and BBC Website. We found that BBC website shows that the most favoured genre was drama (111) followed by animation (73) then followed by comedy (70). However, when we researched short films in You-tube we gathered that the main genre was comedy. This was due to the fact that You-tubes main target audience people aged from 14-25 while BBC’s main target audience is from 25 and over. As a result this shows that the comedy genre is favoured more by the younger age group.

Methodology:

We decided to go to Leicester square and give out our questionnaire to ten people and then interview four people of different age groups to gather more in-depth information. We chose Leicester Square because we thought that this location would be ideal to achieve a wider range of audiences.

 

Quantitative Questionnaire:

Are you male or female?  (Circle answer)    Female         Male                  

What is your age?

What is your preferred genre?

Comedy     Horror    Drama     Animation      Action       Adventure     Thriller

State the name and genre of your favourite short film.

What did you enjoy about this film?

State the main type of films you watch? (Circle Answer)

Mainstream cinema films             independent cinema films               short films

How regularly do you watch short films? (Circle Answer)

All the time     regularly     sometimes     hardly       never

Where you aware about the film festival during last week and have you ever attended one before?

Semi- Structured Interviews:

We decided to choose this method because we believe that this method allows in depth information to be gathered. This will also allow us to understand reasons to why there may be a difference in the genre of short films watched from different age groups.

We intended to interview a wide range of different age groups; we want to begin by interviewing two individuals from seventeen to twenty five as initially they were our target audience. However, we want to develop our research so that it involves people from the age group of twenty six to forty. The reason to why we want to include the older generation is to be compare them with the younger age group and see wich group are more aware of short films. Furthermore we wanted to see not only if our target audience would watch our short comedy film but to also see if the older age group would  watch our short film and if so then we know our film will be succesful with a wider age group. 

It’s a semi-structured interview so therefore it’s going to consist of very few closed ended questions and many open ended questions as we want to develop an in-depth conversation with the individuals in order to gather more information for our research.

These are some samples of the questions which we may ask:

 1 – What age group do you belong to?

2- Do you watch short films if yes, state what you enjoy most about them, if no state the reasons to why it does not interest you?

3- What is your favoured genre in terms of short films?

If no, state your preferred genre in a feature length film.

4- Would you watch short films if more comedy was involved?

These are the videos of the two different age-groups that both Me and Antigona interviewed in Leicester Square:

1)

Sex- Male

Age- 28

2)

 

Sex- Female

Age- 36

3)

Sex- Female

Age- 19

4)

Sex- Female

Age- 20

Questionnaire on short comedy films

After we did research on YouTube about short films we found that comedy was the most favoured genre, whereas in the BFI we found that it was drama; which is a genre mainly associated with an older age group. Therefore in order to back-up our studies we carried out a questionnaire; asking 10 students in our sixth form questions about short films. We wanted to be sure that the younger generation would be interested in watching short films if more comedy was involved.

How old are you?

What is your gender?     Male      female

Do you watch short films? If no, please give reason    Yes             No    

State the main type of films you watch?

Mainstream Cinema        Independent cinema films        Short films

Would you watch short films if there was more comedy involved?       Yes         No

Due to research we found that:

·         6 out of 10 students do not watch short films

·         4 out of 10 students watch short films

·         2 out of ten students would not watch short films, even if more comedy was involved

·         8 out of 10 students would watch short films if more comedy was involved.

We asked the students who replied ‘No’ to watching short films and asked them why they didn’t watch them. These are some of the replies;

·         “There’s no advertisement for short films, so I’ve never heard them.”

·         “Because their way too short, so there’s no point of even watching them.”

·         “They’re too short and they don’t have enough detail, so I don’t understand them.”

From this we found that our short film will be successful with the younger generation, as long as there is comedy involved. Some of them also said that they don’t have enough detail in them to understand and so in our script we will include information in the dialogue that tells the audience the relationship between the characters.

Silva and Antigona