Dark obsessions – Focus group

Me and my partner organised and held a focus group based on the film opening we created for our film, Dark Obsessions, and aimed to gain helpful constructive criticism from our target audience which could help us to make improvements in the future. We screened our opening and gave our audience an insight onto how we created the film opening and then gave out questionnaires for them to complete to give us a brief idea on what they thought and whether they enjoyed it or not. In order to ensure our focus group wasn’t biased and we got a wide range of feedback we tried our best to vary the demographic of the audience there, for example we chose people of a range of ages that belonged to both genders. Our focus group carried out in school where students and teachers came along to watch.

The presentation we showed to our audience gave them a brief analysis on how planned, filmed and edited our opening scene. We also mentioned some of the difficulties we faced and what we aim to do with our opening in the future.

After screening our opening the questionnaires were handed out and we asked everyone to fill it out in complete honesty to help us make improvements in the future. Altogether 15 people completed our questionnaire to make sure it was fair and our results would vary.

1. Our questionnaire began by asking the target audience how the opening made them feel. They were given a range of different options from tense, to confused, to happy. Overall the majority of the audience said they felt scared/tense. These are the results we wanted to receive as they conform to the genre of our film which is a thriller.

2. Next we decided to make our answers more free/broad by coming away from multiple choice questions and asked the audience what they enjoyed most about the screening and what they found made it more engaging. Out results varied from ‘the music’ to things like ‘the dark lighting was effective’. I am pleased with these results as it signifies to me and my group the music is in synch to the shots.

3. The third question asked what the audience feel needs to be improved. Most of the people who filled out the questionnaire said there wasn’t much more we could do to make it more engaging. As pleased as I

Dark obsessions – Focus group

was with these results I needed some sort of negative feedback to help me make improvement in the future. One person said the shots were ‘to fast’ which could be improved by taking out some of the jump cuts to slow it down in general. Although he/she said this I feel jump cuts are crucial as they help to build tension. Another person said we could have made it longer but as we were restricted to a certain time limit we was unable to do this but it is definitely something we could aim to do in the foreseeable future.

4. We finished our survey by asking what genre people thought our thriller film, Dark Obsessions was. Everyone answered by saying either thriller or horror. This was satisfying as the majority of our audience guessed correctly. This connoted to me and my group overall we done a good job on our opening scene.

Photographic evidence of both our questionnaires and focus group can be seen below: