Audience Research - Focus Group

We decided on our target audience, which is quite wide, with the only really target audience being that they are between the ages of 15 and 30 and enjoy comedy films. We then began to draft a list of people to be part of our focus group, wrote our letter to invite them, and began to write some potential questions for the group.

Below is a copy of our letter:

'Dear Sir or Madam,

We are inviting you to take part in a focus group as part of our media coursework on the 5^th December 2011 in Media room 2, Jo Richardson school at 3:30pm. We intend to share with you our film treatment and show you some examples of films within the genre we are working with. We would like to ask you some questions as we believe you would be part of the target audience for our film and we need to find out whether or not the plot/ideas we have for our film would be appealing to you.

We, as part of our coursework, would like to film the focus group as evidence of the discussions we will be having. This is to keep a record of the responses we will have, and if you do not want to be filmed by us then please give us notice.

We would greatly appreciate it if you could attend and look forward to seeing you. Please RSVP to 06rkent@jrcs.bardaglea.org.uk.

Yours Sincerely,

Jamie Payne, Ryan Kent, Alisha Ward, Kayleigh Morris'

After we wrote the letter, we began to come up with questions which we could potentially use whilst we interview the focus group, referring to the genre alone, our opening sequence, and the appeal of the two to our target audience. The potential questions, in the order in which we came up with them, are written below:

From our film treatment, what genre would you say the film is?

What is it about this genre that you enjoy?

Would the opening sequence make you want to watch the rest of the film, and why?

How could we make the film more appealing to our target audience?

What would you judge the target audience to be?

Would the film appeal to you?

What would you like to see in a comedy film?

What would you do in order to challenge the conventions of the genre?

We are now going to revise the questions and put them into the order of how we will ask them, particularly the first few, as after this we hope the discussion will become more natural and flow better than if we just asked the questions in a strict order and had them answer.