Focus Group

For my focus group I gathered a group of 20, 15-19 year olds and screened them my film. I decided to ask this amount of people as I felt that 20 was a large enough group that I would be given a range of opinions, but it was also small enough that I could really listen and react to the different feedback that I was given. The 15- 19 year olds were made up of 8 males and entirely females. It was very important to me to have a only females included as the target audience for my film is women.

The main reasons I held this focus group was because I wanted to find out about:

1.       The emotional response to the film,

2.       Any criticism on the acting/performance,

3.       Feedback on the the continuity of the films narrative,

4.       Any response to the backing tracks effect on the film

5.       The audience’s overall enjoyment of the film.

I carried out the research myself because I believed it would be a beneficial learning experience and it would mean that I can hear the critique from the group first hand. The first showing resulted in a casting change and minor changes to the narrative, script and casting because they stated that the film seemed cliché making the emotive response in the audience towards the film and the characters harder. The second showing had only minor improvements on their responses so to improve this I completely rewrote the script and narrative and changed the casting of the female characters.

One of the biggest changes in narrative was to make the boyfriends speech seem like a memory rather than an imagined conversation. The original plan was for the boyfriend to be speaking to the protagonist as an imagined conversation. I wanted this to show that the protagonist was feeling guilty about the way she had spoken to him. Instead of looking like a reflection of her conscience it instead looked “cheesy” and someone in the focus group said it almost appeared comical. I instead changed this and included a fight scene instead. I felt this argument showed the characters regrets in a much more clear way it also made the film feel more believable.

Throughout the editing process I used to the focus groups to help with minor decisions such as camera shots and positioning which proved to be much more helpful and insightful due to their impartial opinion. When the film was finished in editing I showed the focus group a full final viewing of the film, the answers to all the questions came back positive however some members stated that the continuous song, although being a good emotive fit to the genre, made the film seem more like a music video due to the lack of other non-diegtic sound. However, when correcting this problem the overall vote was that the original was better for continuity purposes.