Public Survey - Film & Trailer Conventions

I used a website called SurveyMonkey to create a short questionnaire consisting of 3 questions.

I only needed a small amount of responses for this survey as I just wanted to get an idea of some of the conventions that real people expect to see within film trailers, this is why I made the questionnaire short. I also included genre specific questions such as questions 1 and 2 as I haven't chosen my genre yet and therefore the responses for these will help give me an idea of some of the conventions that they expect to see within the genre that they chose. Below are the questions that I asked:

My fellow classmates were my participants that I chose. They are between the ages of 17-18, which I know is a strict age range however I knew that they all had prior knowledge about films and a lot of personal experience with watching them, this meant that I knew their answers would be useful and they know what they are talking about.

After leaving the survey for a couple of days I collected all the respondents answers and analyzed the results which can be seen below.

As we can see, out of 12 participants, 7 chose horror/thriller, 2 chose romantic comedies, 2 chose animated films, 2 chose comedies and a further 3 chose action. From this we can gather that the horror/thriller genre is the most popular within the 17-18 age range. This is something that I need to take into consideration as these two ages will more than likely be included in my target audience. 

Here are some of the respondents answers to the final question about what they expect to find within a film trailer. Some of the responses were aimed at particular genre however most of them were for trailers in general. I can see clearly from these results what this group of people expect to find within a film trailer. 

There is a variety of answers although their is a common ground between them all. The re-occuring  conventions that were mentioned were:

1. Show some of the best scenes but not so many that it gives away the story line.
2. Name of the film at the end of the trailer.
3. A soundtrack featuring music conventional to that genre of film. 
4. Name of the actors. 

Because of these I feel like these chosen conventions need to be highlighted by myself as this group all think that these particular things should be included. 

My survey has helped me immensely as I now have some real life audience feedback and know what the most important things clearly are for my trailer. I will take these results into careful consideration as I will have to think about incorporating these conventions into my own work when I finally decide on my genre and target market.