Focus Group

Just like AS level, a focus group was conducted to gain a better understanding of what should be expected within our short film. But, unlike last year, the questions would be very different due to the fact that short films are not as popular as feature length films. Because of this, we needed to make sure that questions we asked didn't confuse the members of the focus group or create dis-illusion about what is expected of our short film. Though the group wasn't as big as expected, two of the three members were media students, and one student didn't study media. We felt that this would benifit the production better as someone with no real experience of short films would show more of what the majority of audiences want, not just what is told to the media students.

The questions were chosen as a group to keep conversation going within the group. Awkward silences would not only not benifit our research what so ever, but also the members of the focus group would feel less comfortable answering the questions. We had a first attempt at a focus group, and the questions were too specific, and the members of the focus group feel victim to the awkward silences. An example of these questions would be:

What is your favourite short film? and How many short films have you seen?

These questions don't promote a real answer as the majority of any group would say they haven't seen many short films (and won't remember what they were), and won't attempt to look for a short film for cheap 5 minute entertainment. To prevent this, we made the questions more broad to keep the group interested and provide better reseach material for our short film. This is why the questions had to be about films in general, and then we slowly moved into the category of short films, still not trying to make an awkward moment arise.

These were the questions we eventually came up with:

1) What is your favourite film (in general) and why?
2) What do you think makes a good film?
3) What characters do you best associate with within a film?
4) Where would you preferably watch a short film?
5) What would you like to see in our short film that would make you want to see it?

Those were the questions and this is how the focus group went: