Focus Group

Today we completed our focus group in order to gain an understanding of what people enjoy about British Film drama and their opinion on how we could make a successful product. I am going to do some analysis of the feedback and what information we gathered in a separate post.

We began our focus group by telling people what genre we were planning our trailer on and the typical conventions you would associate with this particular genre, asking for their opinions as we went through a powerpoint Sam had produced. We then shared a few examples of films that are categorised as British drama and asked whether or not they had seen any of them and if so were they successful and would you watch a film of that style again. We had a lot of really useful feedback and most people had seen the example films we mentioned, having lots of positives to say about them.

We then showed the members of our focus group three film trailers, Bronson, Legend and This is England. After watching each trailer we asked for what they thought was successful about the trailer, along with what they didn't like so we knew how we could make ours different and suitable for our target audience of 15-25 years. From this we got a lot of feedback, which has given us an insight into what we need to include and what not to include.

After watching the film trailers we had three important questions that we wanted feedback on to help us structure our film trailer. Our first question was whether the audience would prefer a group or single narrative. For example, Bronson is very much a single narrative focussing on the one main character. However, some films use more of a group dynamic, for example, This is England in which the story looks at more than one character in detail. In addition, we then wanted the groups opinion on a name for the film. We gave them a couple of our ideas, "Young Breed" and " Street Life" in which we got some useful feedback on. Finally, we wanted ideas on the genre of music that we should use. We noticed that many of the British Drama films are set further back in time and that the music they use tends to be from that time period. We wanted to know whether we should use modern music or a track from the past.

Overall, the focus group was a very useful and important task in order for us to see what our target audience like and dislike about this genre and changes that we could make to the ideas we came up with.