Focus Group Interview 1
As part of our research, we asked a few people who we felt represented the most significant part of our target audience and asked them questions about their feelings and level of interest towards teaser trailers and films in the superhero genre to help get an idea of whether or not our idea of a Red Hood origin story could be successful or not.
Our first question was in two parts, whether they watched them or not, and then what parts of them they enjoyed most. The responses were all really focused on the action scenes showed in them and how they're used to build up hype for the film because viewers are expecting to see it and are intrigued by what happens beforehand in the movie to lead up to that climax with less dialogue, just a battle which is crucial to the plot being shown, with nothing being explained in the trailer to spoil the film.
This leads to the next question we asked which was what they didn't like to see in teaser trailers - which was too much plot, dialogue from the actual film and the pace of the trailer being too slow to build up excitement. Another thing was the inclusion of every action scene from the film being included in the teaser to try to build up interest from fans, resulting in them having seen every interesting scene from the movie already when it's actually released in cinemas. To avoid this, a lot of our teaser trailer would include a lot of muted shots and voiceovers that we wouldn't include in the full film so that it doesn't seem like you could've seen the entire film only through trailers - which is what happens a lot in modern film when too many trailers, tv spots and adverts are created to sell a movie.
Next we asked what conventions of the superhero genre they enjoyed and felt were important for a good film. The responses to this were based around the connectivity between films in established universes such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Comics Cinematic Universe and also a the portrayal of an effective villain - such as that of the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. The villain having an understandable motive for their action - and not being seen before on the big screen makes people be a lot more interested in them, like Venom in Spider-Man 3 and The Winter Soldier in Captain America 2. Other things that they enjoy are when the line between villain and hero becomes blurred as a result of the events in a movie or a character's past, showing that these are real people and have more than one side to them than just the day-to-day hero.
Conventions they didn't like to see were based mostly around the poor construction of character relationships, both social and intimate. They felt that production companies and writers forget who their audience is and what they were showing on screen - an example of this given was the upside-down kiss scene from the original Spider-Man movie. Another response was that the main female character in the film - who is usually a love interest - is essentially useless and is just used by the villain to lure the protagonist in to get the upper hand over them - a plan which is used time and time again in films across several genres and is now boring, predictable and tedious to sit through.
Our focus group also stated that action between important characters, showcasing what makes them unique, 'super' and different in a sense from other people, for example what was suggested to us was to include a snippet of a fight between The Red Hood and Batman where they use their martial arts skills and look to be equally matched - something to get prior fans of The Red Hood excited as they'd know he was Robin; Batman's apprentice beforehand - so he would know how Batman fights and be able to adapt his plan to try and take him down. This would give the movie a 'the student has become the master' tone and move away from the typical Batman movie where we see his parents murdered and how he takes up the mantle of the caped crusader.
