Survey (This took a while to get round to, oops)

Right, so having been on a bit of a blogging frenzy of late, I figured I would go back to our research, which involved creating a survey based around thrillers (and in particular thriller openings). The survey was really our market research, and what with the technological awesomeness of the internet, reaching out to our audience could be done with the click of a button. Having not really decided on our idea at the time (this survey was done a long time ago), we went asked questions that were vague, trying to see what specific thing cropped up the most and work from there. Which was fine. This was only the first stage of our research, and in retrospect getting the feedback from the public was, at the time, invaluable. We achieved 56 responses, and going into the survey I thought a realistic target of 50 replies would be a large enough result to make our survey widespread, with a range of different answers and demographics. Obviously, if I were to evaluate, I would say that we could have got more responses. How did we get our answers? Well, social media is certainly a powerful force: sharing our survey link on Facebook, Twitter etc. (as well as the age-old 'Ask-the-parents-to-do-it' tactic), this was how we got the bulk of our responses...

Are you male or female?

So, first question was the classic 'male/female' tick-box, and I can exclusively reveal that 64% of all responses came from the ladies. The lack of balance between male-female could have been worse, but I definitely think a females attitude to thrillers is definitely different to that of a male. Maybe I'm just being stereotypical, but the archetypal 'lads' idea of a thriller would be more violence,gore, nudity based as opposed to a girls idea of a thriller, which would be more Midsummer murders than Die Hard. Boy, did that sound sexist. Moving swiftly on....

How many years young are you?

Next was a classic questionnaire Q and A: How old are you? Actually, 35 of our 58 responses were from the 16-30 category; in other words, over half. I'm happy with this: if I had to select one of the above age brackets for our target audience, I would have probably have said '16-30' because, in essence, their the bulk of the thriller-going audience (as I found out other bits of research). Having said that, it is good to have other demographics to balance out the opinions gleaned from our survey. For instance, the five golden-oldies in our survey may have had an insight into the sub-genres of times gone by, such as neo-noir as well as the Hitchcock-era of 'classy' thrillers. So, on balance, I think we got a good range of ages...

Next up was 'what do you like about thrillers?' Here are just a small range of answers to that question:

Pace; psychological plot twists; action; extraordinary characters - or ordinary characters forced to make extraordinary decisions; the odd red herring to make you question;

Suspense 
Car chases, intricate plots, twists in the tail, paranoia and psychological tricks, fear of or actual violence and torture
Character development, suspense, plot twists...
A lot of interesting answers, albeit nothing that I didn't expect to be brutally honest. Although it didn't interest me how much that 'suspense' cropped up time and time again, and whilst I think the idea of suspense is quite a clichéd notion associated with thrillers, clearly there's a demand for pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat action. Interesting...

Which is your favourite sub-genre of thriller?

This was an interesting one. Probably the most insightful set of responses from the whole survey, actually. I thought action thriller would be at the top given the Jason Bourne/Bond-era we live in. But no, gangster thriller (which I thought would be right at the bottom given that it's not the most type of film out there) but it was actually in second place with a quarter of all votes. I think of crime films much in the same way as Westerns: a bygone era of film, no longer of interest. I think of the sort of Scorsese, De Palma classics amongst others: Goodfellas, The Godfather, Carlito's Way, The Untouchables, Scarface. All of these films were made ages ago, a genre we could all look back on wistfully and say 'that was a great era of film', but otherwise that was that. So I found the interest in that sub-genre quite surprising. Otherwise I wasn't surprised with our top dog 'Psychological thriller'; in a Daily-mail era of fear-mongering I think there is this internal fear of mental-illness, and the power of the mind to cause havoc with ourselves. Often I find that cinema reflects the time period, and so in that respect it wasn't a surprising 1st place winner.

Next we asked 'based on your last answer, what is it about this sub-genre you like so much?' Responses included things such as:

It makes you think and it's not just all blood and gore

Sci-fi I like the use of special effects and that it can be anywhere that the film is made and any thing can really happen Crime thiller because you can try to solve the mystery throughout the film and its not usually the one you expect 

Complexity

Plausibility

Interestingly, I think the general consensus was that audiences do not like to be patronised, with dumbed down plots etc. And I agree in a way, we all want to feel intelligent when we see a film, although I guess its probably best not to just make up an incoherent plot and claim that its a 'masterpiece' like Inception. People like twists, they want to actively keep guessing what's going to happen next, it's all a part of the movie-going experience. And so maybe that's something we should integrate into our opening...

And then finally, we asked what you would want to see in the opening of a thriller? We got answers such as:

Instant setting of the scene. Don't need massive build up, you want to know instantly what's occurring! Titles with dramatic music, some form of montage followed by intro to either antagonist or protagonista scene that either develops the main characters or the crime itselfenough information to get me interested.

Something I learnt from this question was that people didn't necessarily want to know the in's and out's of what's going on; I suppose this allows the opening to be more exciting and suspenseful. Also, the idea of a montage stood out for me, because montages are harder than they seem; I know this is film-buff sacrilege but I find the opening of 'Se7en' quite dull really, a load of scary stuff in a dark, fast-paced montage... CLICHÉ ALERT! So montages are cool, but hard to pull off in an original, engaging way.

So before I conclude, I just want to say that a link to the survey can be found below:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHdsVlBCZEZIaDJuc1VlNng1RjNicWc6MQ#gid=0

So overall, I've learnt a lot about what people like and dislike about thrillers. The non-specific questions allowed our group to really get to grips with the genre, and therefore its been the catalyst for everything we've done since. We've since taken this knowledge and used it to inspire our very own thriller opening which, very soon, we are about to film!