Development of Ideas Assessment
The results i collected through my questionnaire and focus group interview were what i expected in most cases; this is because we (as a group) picked people who were knowledgeable of the superhero film genre and could gieve us succinct answers to our questions. An example of where i was surprised however, is when we were advised to use an instrumental score instead of a song with lyrics in our teaser trailer. I also expected a wider variation in the age groups that we had answer the questionnaire, as the superhero genre dates all the way back to the 1960's with early productions of batman and superman.
From our questionnaire we learned that not as many people from our target audience watched teaser trailers - only 2 thirds of them actually did - which went against my prior expectations. Teaser trailers are shown through so many mediums so i assumed that at least 85% of them would watch teaser trailers regularly. What didn't surprise me though, was that every single person who answered the questionnaire that did watch teaser trailers used YouTube as their primary source for them.
Our second focus group definitely made the most impact on confirming some of our ideas ' effectiveness in terms of our main characters costume, shot angles, soundtrack and the narrative we'd show in the teaser for our Red Hood idea. The participants shared a lot of our groups tastes and so we were able to gain the knowledge of how to further develop the idea to make it better.
I feel that the most useful insight from our research was that we shouldn't give too much away in terms of the story so that viewers are able to tell exactly what the film is about, whilst also referencing some of the Red Hood's source material and adding 'easter eggs' for other characters to help widen the DC Comics cinematic universe in a way that our audience can easily notice.
This was a major point for our group as it confirmed whether or not we should include a certain scene relating to the character's origin in our trailer and also if we should include voiceovers from the character to help make his motivations clear to the audience by using some of his iconic lines and some of our own to build intrigue and make the teaser really make people interested in the movie.
The principal changes that we chose to make after our research were mostly to do with the costume of the character and our soundtrack that we would use for the trailer.
We opted to change our depiction of the character from a more comic accurate style to one that would not only be aesthetically pleasing like the original, but also be a reflection of who he is as a person. Since he's essentially the apprentice of Batman, we decided to make the costume more functional just like Batman's, whilst also incorporating fashion trends as the character is still just a teenager.
We chose to get rid of the previous song we were going to use for the trailer as our focus group felt that an instrumental score would tie in better with the kind of shots we plan to use and removing the risk of a lyrical taking away from not only what we show on screen but the voiceovers too. Now, we plan to use a song with a slow build-up for establishing shots that gets faster to match the pace of the trailer.
Personally, i feel that our research was very effective as we chose a group of people who were both knowledgeable of the genre of film we're working in and it's conventions whilst also representing a large part of our target audience. The questionnaire was recieved very well and helped clarify things that were ambiguous to us. One thing that i feel i'd change if i could do it again was to spread myt questionnaire out to a wider rainge of people as i fell women who have an interest in superhero films may not have been represented as much as we would have liked.
