Summing up the research

By researching what my target audience wanted to see by doing questionnaires and interviews and also what actually went into romantic comedy openings gave me a clear understanding and helped me a lot to think of an idea that I wanted to create for a romantic comedy film opening. One research strategy was creating questionnaires and only giving them out to my target audience which is teenage girls as if I gave them to any random person it wouldn’t give me the right information that I need and want. So by giving them to selected people it gives me a lot more information and tells me exactly what my target audience wants to see. When creating the questionnaire I had two ideas what I wanted my opening to be about so by asking the question ‘in the opening scene of a romantic comedy what do you prefer to see? a) two friends discussing relationship problems or  b)crying over a tub of ice cream because they’re boyfriend has just dumped them.’ And from the answers that I obtained I found out that almost all my target audience that filled out a questionnaire would much prefer to see option b). So therefore if I had made my opening before evening handing out questionnaires to my target audience and I had opted for option a) most of the majority of my target audience wouldn’t have enjoyed it resulting in my film not getting many views. I also asked people ‘do you like watching romantic comedies?’ the reason behind asking this question was to simply find out my target audiences favourite type of film to watch as if it wasn’t a popular choice I would have had to opt for something else. But once I got my results back it stated that almost ¾ of people said ‘yes’ so it made me stick the original genre that I had in mind.

The other research strategy I mentioned was watching different types of romantic comedies on DVD. I watched the opening 2 minutes of five romantic comedies old and new to get a different range of information. For example my target audience may prefer old romantic comedies to new ones and vice versa so by adding in my final product bits from each it will make all my target audience happy. Also from watching these openings it showed me the different ways of laying out subtitles, shots and background music to make my product more professional looking. To make sure I knew what I was looking for in these openings I devised a series of questions I wanted to ask myself that were appropriate when looking at these openings of different things to look for to help me with mine. For example I included questions such as ‘how many characters are shown in the opening 2 minutes?’, ‘what camera angles are used?’ and is there dialogue used?’ etc. by asking questions like this it means that I can get the best possible outcome when creating my short opening.