Questionnaire & Results

We created a questionnaire to seek information on what elements would need to be incorporated into our short film to appeal to our audience.

 

From our research, we gathered that the majority of the public believe either gender can be the main character of a film, however, those who don't think this lean towards the male rather than the female being the protagonist. As for the victim within a film, the majority also believe either gender could be victimised, however, the likelihood of the female being victimised rather than the male is very high. We decided to make the main character of our short film female, challenging the typical gender stereotypes as a male protagonist is typically seen as powerful and intelligent in place of a feeble, reserved female. Our character 'Lucy Merrill' is, in fact, an intelligent female, but still possesses weak qualities as she is victimised - appealing to the audience's view of a female victim. As they are familiar with this gender being preyed on they will be drawn towards our short film. Regarding the villainous character(s) of our short film, we decided to make the character's cyberbullies anonymous as the bulk of the public suggest that the gender of the antagonist(s) can be male or female. If the cyberbullies of our short film were male, it would be clear as some of the messages that the main characters will receive will be quite crude and highly offensive. On the other hand, if they were female the audience would be able to identify this through how the cyberbullies comment on Lucy's appearance and style. We believe the gender of our antagonist(s) is irrelevant to our narrative as the focus is on one character.

The majority of people that filled out this questionnaire are female, allowing us to receive non-biased data.

Although comedy was voted the most favourite genre, we decided to make our short film a drama as the codes and conventions of this genre are very straightforward and are easily conformable. It would have been difficult for us to precisely produce a comedy or thriller as, typically of short films, there will be only one character and one setting within our short film. Also, because of the designated time frame of 5 minutes, we would not be able to explore these different genres effectively and would have to eliminate key elements of these other genres, e.g. an explanation of a love story, a fighting scene/shootout, and many more.

Following this result, we have decided for our narrative to have a linear structure so that the events that occur are blatantly clear to the audience. This will avoid confusion and ensure that our message of the negativity of cyberbullying and its effects on people will be understood by our audience.

We posed these two questions to get a better understanding of how often short films are actually watched and how they are exposed to the public. The short films stated by our audience will be used as inspiration while we research into similar media products to consolidate our narrative and conform to the codes and conventions of short films. Today, most media texts are delivered to the public via social. With that in mind, when making our short film poster we will ensure our target audience are aware of our media product being released on YouTube - this is the most accessible media outlet for the younger generation as it does not require payment. The short film could have more success online as it potentially enters its way into the ‘trending’ list of videos on YouTube, being promoted to a mainstream audience instead of a niche one and achieving the goal of exposing the short film to as many people as possible.

From this information, we have decided to include components of suspense and tension with the use and/or absence of non-diegetic incidental music. We will use enigma and action codes to pose questions to the audience and answer them with the drive and development of the narrative. The short film will end on a cliffhanger (slightly depicting an open narrative) as the last shot showed will be of a bottle of pills, posing the questions; 'did she or did she not take the pills?' or 'has she just taken her own life?'.